Diary

Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would?

They say it is good to learn new skills as you get older. Well here goes. I am about to arrive in New Haven, Connecticut, to teach as a senior fellow at Yale University. Last time I taught anything to a class it was at Sunday school more than half a century ago. Arriving late at night I see little of the town but then next morning when I draw up the blinds – wow, it’s just like Oxford! In a sense it was meant to be, as Yale’s buildings were to some extent modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. One thing is very different though: there is only one student bar in the university. In my day at Oxford every college had its own bar. Is this a sign of the sobriety of the USA or the sobriety of the young today?

There’s no statute of limitations on reporting a government minister’s embarrassing oops-a-daisy. It’s no good them doing a duck-dive, hoping that by the time they resurface everyone will have forgotten all about it. I remember after the Salisbury poisonings in 2018, Gavin Williamson, who was defence secretary at the time, appeared genuinely thrown when I brought up his Vicky Pollard-like comments about the Kremlin (‘Go away and shut up!’) in a live TV interview a few weeks later. I think it’s fair to say the exchange that followed wasn’t his finest hour. So it was when Rachel Reeves appeared on Good Morning Britain last week.

My beloved 1967 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop guitar is now locked away until December at the earliest. For the past eight years, I have had the terrifying privilege of dragging my axe (as we guitarists call our instruments) on stage to perform in a series of Christmas gigs (as we musicians call such performances) with the celebrated prog rock band Jethro Tull. Ian Anderson, who leads the band, has for years generously staged a series of pre-Christmas concerts to raise funds for English cathedrals. Our 42 cathedrals are some of the greatest expressions of creativity, imagination and hope (more on that later) which our nation has ever produced. They are also mostly bloody freezing, although this year the magnificent, but sadly underrated, Bristol cathedral approached cosy conditions.

‘Traitor!’ the woman yelled at me the instant I entered the beautifully decorated living room of a famous actress. It was a Twelfth Night celebration, and the room was full of glamorous friends and acquaintances. ‘What?’ I replied, bemused. ‘That photo!’ she screamed, ‘How could you take that picture with all those Republicans?’ Over Christmas I had been to a dinner hosted by some good friends who happen to be Republicans. This, it turned out, was a great crime. I am a Tory but have many socialist friends and we get along just fine and have hearty and amusing conversations. Here in America, though, it seems Democrats and the Republicans cannot even mingle. ‘Are you kidding me?’ I asked her. ‘No, I’m not,’ she snapped.

I am now well into my second pregnancy. Having conceived through IVF the first time, we were fortunate to have another embryo stored away in a freezer. It is incredible that a tiny cluster of frozen cells, already a life, can survive, suspended in time for years. The science behind the process continues to amaze me. This second pregnancy is very different from the first, partly because I’ve been battling morning sickness. I’ve never had it before and now feel like I’ve been swaying on a boat for months. Although the second pregnancy is less consuming than the first, I still lie in bed trying to detect a heart beat. But I don’t compare the size of the baby with items in my fruit bowl each day (yes, there is an amazingly popular app that does that).

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International Composer Festival. One of the orchestral works performed was my football-themed ‘Eleven’ (11 players, melodies of 11 notes, chords of 11 pitches and various football chants woven into the fabric of the score). I’m not the first composer obsessed with the beautiful game. Bohuslav Martinu’s ‘Half-time’, written in 1924, was inspired by the supporters of his team, Sparta Prague. And more recently there have been bold examples by English composers Mark-Anthony Turnage (who worked chants for his beloved Arsenal into his orchestral piece ‘Momentum’) and Benedict Mason, in whose opera Playing Away even the ball sings an aria.

‘Ring out the old, ring in the new…’ This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had been a housemaid deflowered, impregnated and turfed out on to the street by her self-evidently villainous employer – but also that another had been land agent to Lord Tennyson. The perfect incentive for me, then, this festive season, to curl up with ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ The poem’s tone of plangent melancholy, its regret that the years must slip by, will be more than usually in tune with my mood: for in 2025, a mere five days after new year, I shall be marking my 57th birthday. There is, as Tennyson well knew, a kind of pleasure in being lugubrious. The older I get, the more I am looking to embrace it.

Mumbai is my kind of town, a party town. In my first weeks living here, I was out most nights with new friends half my age, inevitably resulting in many unproductive mornings. This culminated with me waking from my slumber as the sun rose, contorted uncomfortably on the back seat of an auto-rickshaw parked on the edge of a slum under the hostile gaze of an unimpressed cheroot-smoking driver. I was so inexplicably far north of my south Bombay apartment that it took me two hours to get home, which in itself was no mean achievement given my wallet was empty of cash and my phone battery dead. Still, in many Asian cities both items would have been gone rather than just depleted, and their owner likely to be the one who was dead.

Surely charity is about helping others, not massaging your own ego? Ed Sheeran’s boycott of Band Aid is yet another example of putting virtue-signalling above doing actual good. I thought of delicate petal Ed when I was asked to join some media friends to record a cover version of ‘All You Need Is Love’ to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is building a children’s cancer centre. Our group – shamelessly called The Celebs – included Christopher Biggins, Frank Bruno, Anne Hegerty, the terrifying star of the quiz show The Chase, and a clutch of actors. It was my first time singing in public since I leapt to my feet, aged 12, to lead a singsong at the end of Ramsgate pier on a family summer holiday. The pianist passed a hat round which raised £3.

My old mucker Donald Trump’s return to the White House has predictably sent the woke brigade into hysteria. From posting demented videos and shaving their heads to banning Trump supporters from having sex with them, it’s been a masterclass in the sore loser mentality they profess to despise so much in him. The Guardian is suffering a particularly embarrassing outbreak of PTSD (post-Trump-success distress). The editor’s email offer of support therapy to traumatised staff made me laugh out loud, as did the paper joining the liberal exodus from Elon Musk’s X in an equally comical fit of pique.

How the mighty can fall. I was overwhelmed by the approbation I had received for my one-woman show, Behind the Shoulder Pads at the Adelphi Theatre. Standing ovations would erupt several times during our performance. The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd were heady as my co-star (my hubby Percy) and I took our bows to wild applause and cheering. At the after-party at Rules, the oldest and most revered restaurant in London, we were inundated with admiration and support from everybody there. Two nights later, still glowing from all the attention, Percy, my daughter Katy and I went to the Curzon Cinema in Victoria, our first visit to a big screen for six months. Percy had booked the Ivy Victoria for between 7.45 and 8 p.m.

I have spent the past couple of weeks in Oxford rediscovering the art of conversation while campaigning for election as the university’s chancellor. I have sung for my supper in Christ Church Cathedral before being questioned in the SCR on my fitness for the role, and I performed again at evensong at Univ before debating postcolonial reparations over vegetable broth and venison. I have been gifted cyclamens following visits to St Hilda’s and Corpus. At St Hugh’s my understanding of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was taken apart by the law don, while at Worcester I was challenged on the state of Britain’s naval hard power and the FCDO’s soft power.

What better start to a Monday than to attend Westminster Magistrates’ Court? I was there for the trial of the young OnlyFans model Victoria Thomas Bowen who threw a banana milkshake at my face on the day that I launched my campaign in Clacton. Unbelievably, she planned to plead not guilty despite the fact that the whole thing was caught on camera. Rumours that her reason for doing all of this was because I had unsubscribed from her page are untrue. There was the usual circus of media outside as I arrived, but Victoria still insists she didn’t throw the milkshake just to get publicity for her website. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, she says. Then at the last minute she pleaded guilty. The judge was not impressed.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And – praise be – a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence. No, my problem with American elections – and it viscerally distresses me every four years – is the affront to democracy called the electoral college. I’ve done the maths. The electoral college can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of ‘swing’ states. A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well.

Shortly after Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley, he invited me to lunch at The Spectator. It was, he said, to be an intimate affair. The magazine’s then proprietor, Conrad Black, had made it known that he expected Boris to stand down as editor now that he was embarking on a political career. Speculation as to who might succeed him was intense among ambitious young journalists. And I was one of those at the time who harboured secret hopes. Was this invitation a sign of favour, a laying-on of hands, the anointing of an heir? On arriving at lunch I discovered that there were other guests. Three of them. All of whom were fellow hacks who had also been either tipped as Boris’s successor or had welcomed their names being canvassed.

Not since South Park Elementary’s election campaign between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich has an election bedevilled me as much as this one. On the one hand, the choice is disarmingly simple. One of the candidates is obviously mentally unhinged, delusional, malignant and contemptuous of the rule of law. One of the candidates hasn’t just broken norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic: accepting the results of an election. This is the third time Donald Trump has told us in advance he won’t do that if he doesn’t win. And the second time, he incited a mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

‘Yous!’ a train cleaner in rubber gloves says as we arrive at Liverpool Lime Street. ‘What are yous doing here?’ He is grinning and holding up the political journalists and delegates dribbling from the Euston train like a leaky hose. Behind me waits Tim Shipman, the consummate chronicler of Conservative political chaos. I once sent Shippers a photograph of me sitting between my brothers Boris and Jo in a row on a cream chintz sofa at Chevening, all holding his hardback Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. It was 2017. Instead of exchanging books which we had written – as is the family Christmas custom – everyone had given each other his. Those were the days to be a hack, eh. Or a politician. Drama! Box office! Action!