Diary

Santa Barbara It was a long way to go for a first night: the 10-hour flight to Los Angeles, then a two-hour drive along the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Barbara, a place fondly, but somewhat inaccurately, known as the Californian Riviera — fine beaches but, alas, no warm Mediterranean sea. It was worth the expense and effort because this was no ordinary first night; Nanette and I were there for the world premiere of Stephen Schwartz’s first opera, based on my 1963 film Séance on a Wet Afternoon. The occasion proved to be the Full Monty in reverse — a black tie, diamonds and tiaras affair in the Granada Theatre refurbished at a cost of $43 million dollars.

Alan Clark will always have a special place in my heart. He remains the only person ever to sue me for libel. I still occasionally have a nightmare in which he is personally cross-examining me in the witness box and the court is erupting in laughter at his sneering sallies and my flustered answers. What happened was that, in the course of a rather turgid article in the TLS about the Tories’ prospects (it was 1996 and they were dismal), I remarked that Mr Alan Clark was ‘colourful certainly, endearing possibly but not exactly a man of bottom’. Alan erupted, claiming that I had accused him of financial dishonesty and linked him to the Tory MPs who were being skewered for sleaze at the time.

A week to enjoy the autumn sunshine by the sea. Gluttony is no longer fashionable but what better way to celebrate my birthday on Monday than to spend a few hours at the Royal Native Oyster restaurant in Whitstable? Sitting by the Kent beach, I confess to consuming 24 oysters, a crab, a lobster, two bottles of Pouilly Fumé, a plum crumble and Irish coffee. Thankfully my wife was more modest. All her entreaties for restraint were answered by my description of Samuel Pepys’s vastly superior daily consumption as described in Claire Tomalin’s wonderful biography. Inevitably, I later collapsed on the shingle rereading that day’s lead entry in the Times’s ‘Happy Birthday’ column.

‘Be very careful, Susans, I have find an adder in the wheelbarrow.’ ‘Nah, it’ll be a grass snake, Spiros.’ Stern glare. ‘Susans, don’t forget I am from Corfu.’ ‘OK, it’s an adder.’ All God’s creatures are welcome here — but an adder? I was treated for my wasp allergy by Professor David Warrell, a world expert on venoms, snakes a speciality, and he says, ‘Never underestimate the humble adder.’ Oh, don’t worry. I now know what to do, am reassured that adders do not strike out at random and the household is on high alert to wear Wellingtons in long grass at all times. Naturally the adder has vanished. Spiros says it emerged to bask in the one day of warm sunshine this summer.

Everywhere I go in Manhattan I meet British tourists. ‘Oi, Boris,’ they shout across the street, ‘who let you out, then?’ How come it is the Brits, with their puny devalued pounds, who are swarming through the streets of New York, when the New Yorkers have stopped coming to London? Tourism from North America to London has fallen by 21 per cent. That is why I am over here leading a London delegation. We are here to fly the flag for our city, to drum up investment, to illustrate the sensational value represented by sterling denominated assets — and before you even ask, let me assure you that my mission is not costing the taxpayer a red cent. The big political question here is still health care.

I’ve never worked out how so many Swedes can be atheists when the Stockholm archipelago is prima facie proof of God’s existence. For years I have been coming to worship and this summer I rented a house by the water. It is my idea of paradise: a week of forest walks, saunas and — last Saturday — dinner for 20 to celebrate my wife Linda’s birthday. As we shop for it on the Friday, in a supermarket with separate sections for herring and cuts of reindeer, my mobile phone starts to erupt. Back in London, I have just been named the next editor of The Spectator and am sent texts and emails by everyone I have ever met. I make a mental note to save all the messages — especially the flattering ones — on paper.

Monday Wish we could decide whether the recession is over or not. Or at least decide what shape it is. Mr Letwin and Mr Willetts spend hours in the Tranquillity Room arguing about whether it’s a V, W or an L. My own theory, which I put forward at morning strategy meeting today, is that we are in a B-shaped recession. I don’t think everyone understood. Tom said ‘don’t be ridiculous. Who ever heard of a recession shaped like a B?’ He’s always undermining me, probably because I rejected his advances. Told him he can pour scorn on my macroeconomic predictions all he likes. But we have to plan how many more bad news stories we need to get us through the recession.

I’m researching a new history of Baghdad. What strikes you most about this unfortunate part of the world is how extreme violence and bloodshed have been endemic to the city from its foundation by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur in ad 762 to the present day. Baghdad may have been christened the City of Peace but, as Richard Coke wrote in the last history of the Iraqi capital in English, published in 1927, a year after Gertrude Bell’s death, ‘The story of the City of Peace is largely the story of continuous war.’ Hardline Sunnis were impaling and burning alive ‘heretic’ Shia 1,000 years ago. Jews and Christians occasionally got it in the neck, too, and caliphs were always on the lookout for more ingenious methods of inflicting pain.

I spent last weekend in Edinburgh taking part in a small celebration of a friend’s eventful life. Fred was dazzlingly intelligent and witty and kind, and though I hadn’t seen him in years, the news of his death came as an awful shock. Poignantly, I first heard the news from Cary, one of my best friends. After getting off the phone, I was mugged by a young man I’m guessing couldn’t appreciate the grim irony: I was already feeling so bereft that I couldn’t care less. Oddly, I spent a good deal of time thinking about my assailant. What led him to become a crook, and would he wind up in some grim, miserable prison, leaving a weeping mother behind, and perhaps a child? Perhaps I’m taking compassionate conservatism too far.

Since the Scottish Borders is not a nationalist stronghold, we don’t often see Alex Salmond in these parts. But the SNP leader was in Melrose recently as the Scottish Government (as his ministry styles itself) held a Cabinet meeting in the town. Such events are dressed up as ‘outreach’ and an ‘opportunity’ to hear from ‘other voices’ but, in reality, are really campaign events. This was followed by a public meeting — part of Salmond’s grand National Conversation on Scotland’s constitutional future — at which, for once, more than 100 people turned up. The First Minister boasted that there had been 40 such events across the country, attended by more than 4,000 people.

If you want to place-drop seriously, Bayreuth weighs in at a couple of tons. It has to be the snootiest place on earth to spend the height of one’s summer, though it’s not immediately obvious why. It’s not the Côte d’Azur nor the Amalfi coast, which offer the perfect climate and geology for beautiful people and brainless pleasures. No, Bayreuth offers only intense heat and high humidity, and as an excruciatingly bourgeois sleepy-town, it is only interested in intellectual stimulations. And the crowd is certainly not beautiful. Bayreuth is an ugly, giant Van de Graaff generator in the middle of nowhere in Bavaria.

As the President of the Associates of Rada and an ex-Rada student, I was asked to make a speech about my days at the academy for the third-year students and some of my friends.Speech-giving is tough, speech-writing even tougher and I envy Mr Obama and his silky way with words. Does he write them himself, I wonder, or does he have a team of experts crafting his elegant soliloquies? Certainly his recent speech in Kenya was masterful and he verbalised what many people thought for years and dared not speak for fear of offending the Gods of Political Correctness: namely, that Africa is to blame for its recent troubles. My Rada speech was only a teensy bit politically incorrect but nevertheless it seemed to go down quite well.