Diary

I spent Sunday in the BBC TV studio in Arromanches through six hours of live coverage of the D-Day commemoration. It would never do to tell them this, but I would have done it for nothing. It is 30 years since I took part in a big outside broadcast. The cliché is true: it brings out the best in the Beeb. No one else can do anything like it. Even when vulgarity has overtaken some other bits of the Corporation, the Events department has inherited from the Richard Dimbleby era an instinctive sense of national responsibility and an infinite capacity for taking pains. I was moved by how jolly and committed the huge crew was, even the riggers dolled up in jackets and ties. The new chairman gave me a cigar — two cigars.

I was once naive enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked Eastbourne, and he replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it. The same was true of Heywood Hill, the Bookshop for the Quality. He owned that too, and was generous enough to endow a special prize, presented each year during a jolly garden party at Chatsworth, to a writer not just for one book but for a lifetime’s achievement. This year the prize goes to Dame Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl’s achievements are so many that she really deserves ten prizes, but this will do very nicely to be going on with. Like almost all really good prose writers in our language, she is primarily a comic creator.

I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in their one-way systems and in the architecture of their civic and municipal buildings. By contrast, some of the English town centres seem to have been structured by saboteurs bent on uglifying them. One regularly finds a 21st-century monstrosity built out of giant glass eggshells sitting next to a classic 16th-century steepled church, which is in turn adjacent to a concrete bunker.

Cannes A year ago this week I tried to sell my idea for a blockbuster movie to Sam Goldwyn Junior. It was 12 noon, at the Majestic Hotel. I picked up my briefcase and strode past the upturned packet of Paprika Pringles on the floor. You don’t mess around before this sort of meeting. You prepare — numbers, market share, audience demographics. ‘Tell me,’ opened the mogul, ‘about your film.’ Without hype, but without understatement I laid it out. ‘Eating & Weeping is a Hollywood classic,’ I told him. ‘It is the mainstream, genre movie of Stanko the Bulgarian pastry chef, who accidentally causes the collapse of capitalism.’ Goldwyn looked blank so I pressed on.

Having once reviewed TV for a living, I obviously never watch the damn thing at all these days if I can help it. But like many males of my age and temperament, I was engrossed late last year by a series called Grumpy Old Men, in which celebrities railed in a futile but well-paid manner against some of the iniquities of the modern world. Some of these men were funny, others were just furious, while a few had obviously been chosen because they were celebrities, and not because they had anything of the slightest interest to say. But never mind. The extraordinary impact of this programme confirmed my own long-held conviction that rage is the emotion of the day. Love is all around, said Richard Curtis in his film Love, Actually. But how did most people respond to this message?

My granddaughter was christened at the Brompton Oratory on Saturday. Although the day was muggy and storms had been forecast, I am sorry to say that there was no thunder and lightening. Like Hector Berlioz recalling the circumstances of his birth — ‘I came into the world quite naturally, unheralded by any of the signs which, in poetic ages, preceded the advent of remarkable personages’ — I was a little put out that Holly’s reception into the Church was not accompanied by some celestial commotion. Other than that, the only bleak thing about the service was that it forced me yet again to confront my own perfidy: over the years, and with barely a thought, I have broken most of the baptismal vows I have made as a parent and godparent.

Washington Not since Randolph Churchill’s The Fight for the Tory Leadership has any book of political reportage caused as much of a stir on either side of the Atlantic as Bob Woodward’s latest bestseller Plan of Attack. In the last few days I have listened to detailed dissections of the gospel according to Woodward. I have discussed his book in the West Wing of the White House, at student seminars at Georgetown University, during dinner with my fellow columnists of the American Spectator and at the hospitable home of its editor-in-chief, Bob Tyrrell. I even had a conversation about Woodward in a place where his fierce anti-war opponents would no doubt like to see President George W. Bush — a high-security Texas prison.

As I lead a life of more or less untroubled serenity and I am in perfect health (except for a slight cough), it was unsettling to learn that I had cancer and that it looked inoperable. It wasn’t, thankfully, and a most delightful surgeon cut it out. Cancer is a strange disease and I am aware that it may still be lurking around biding its time, but there is nothing to be gained by fussing. Anyway, I still feel in perfect health and so when people ask if I feel better I have to explain that, so far, I haven’t felt ill. When the locals learned of my condition, as locals will, they all said that Eric, who lives a mile away up the mountain, had had the same thing and was now as fit as a flea.

It was our last day in Courchevel, and everyone was having a snowball fight by the lifts at 1850, when my friend Charlotte said in urgent tones, ‘You know you’ve been looking for Posh Spice?’ Too damn right I had. Le tout Courchevel had been hunting the maritally troubled superstar, who was rumoured to be somewhere on the slopes patching things up with ‘the most famous Englishman since Nelson’ (Rees-Mogg). One wife of a stupendously rich Goldman Sachs banker had pursued her so fast down Pralong, a blue run, that she had beaned herself with her own ski and needed four stitches. ‘Well, don’t look now,’ said Charlotte, ‘but she’s standing about six feet away over my left shoulder.’ I goggled and, by Jesus, there she was.

I gave up smoking 11 months ago. It had reached the point where I had come to regard eating as an inconvenient interruption to smoking. People keep asking me if I feel any better but I don’t really. I have a permanent cold, excessive catarrh, I experienced hay fever last summer for the first time, and I have insomnia in the early hours. I’m told by ex-smokers that this can last for two years as the body adjusts. I was smoking too much: 60 Silk Cut Extra Mild a day and, thanks to successive chancellors, was spending about £5,000 a year on the habit. I began buying nicotine replacement patches at £17 for a week’s supply and then discovered they could be bought on prescription at just over £6 for a month’s worth.

Has any prime minister been quite so insulated from Parliament and Cabinet? Blair’s solo performance last week, as he flew from Madrid to Libya to Brussels with his plane-load of captive journalists, was another reminder of how far Britain’s foreign policy revolves around a single man; while the procession departing from No. 10 has left him personally more isolated. As I’ve been inspecting again the Anatomy of Britain, I’ve been looking for times when No. 10 was similarly holed up over the last half-century. It’s true that Macmillan, Wilson and Thatcher were often accused of overcentralising power, but they all kept closer links with Parliament than has Blair, even in a crisis.

How many novels do I have to write before reviewers stop saying ‘surprisingly good for a cook’? A friend says tartly that it’s a bit rich to complain — I could have been judged on my merits by writing under a pseudonym, only then I might not have been published at all. Another disheartening discovery is that my new novel, aimed at fortysomethings, has a title that only the over-sixties get. The phrase A Lovesome Thing was greeted by blank faces until I visited a literary festival in the Cotswolds. The audience was all female and all grey. ‘Anyone know what A Lovesome Thing is?’ I asked. They sang out in response: ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!/ Rose plot/ fringed pool.

By now they must have finished sifting the 79 applications and be drawing up the actual shortlist for the chairmanship of the BBC. Nothing as remotely exciting has ever happened in that strange Trafalgar Square annexe of government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is, of course, an absurd ministry, originally invented, if under the different name of National Heritage, by John Major to oblige his mate David Mellor. (Memo to prime ministers: it is nearly always a bad idea to create ministries to suit the convenience of individuals — Mellor soon proved that and so, if in a different way, did George Brown at the DEA in the 1960s.

I see that the papers have finally given a name — ‘chavs’ — to the new working class. They are the type of people I have been drawing for years: trailer trash covered in bling bling, wearing Burberry baseball hats, white tracksuit bottoms and white trainers. They couldn’t be more different from the docile ‘pint-of-mild-please’ working class of the 1930s. I remember Mass Observation and the films by Humphrey Jennings, which collated their behaviour as if they were animals in a wildlife documentary. Try doing that now: ‘Wot you looking at?’ ‘Er ...nothing. I was just observing you drinking a large Jack Daniel’s and Coke so as to understand the sociological dynamic of the prole ...Ow! For God’s sake, don’t hit me!

June. My first day back in Britain after eight years in America and I couldn’t be happier. The sun is shining and I have a large cheque in my pocket with which to conclude the purchase of a nice house in Norfolk. Things could not be better. Setting off from Gloucester Road Underground station, I join a throng waiting for a Circle Line train that never comes. Silently we wait and wait — for ten minutes, then 15 — but nothing happens. ‘I remember when trains used to go by here,’ I remark brightly after a time to the man beside me. By chance he is a fellow American, but new to the country, and possibly to humour, and doesn’t realise I’m joking. ‘Are you saying there are no trains here?’ he asks in alarm.

I’ve always considered myself a working actress and like about 98 per cent of my fellow thespians spend a great deal of time ‘resting’ involuntarily. It therefore irks when great swaths of the media refer to actors disparagingly as ‘luvvies’ and represent us as parasites and people who love swanning around and dressing up. I’ve just started rehearsing Full Circle with the nicest, most hardworking and dedicated group of people you could find, and that is how I’ve found most actors to be. Because they love working in a vastly overcrowded profession, they often get paid far too little.

It had never occurred to me that India might have an obesity problem, but apparently it does. Just before leaving India this month to return to Britain, where I found an obesity panic going on — see this week’s cover story — I chanced upon a story in the Times of India headlined ‘Obesity costs India dear’. According to the article, 27 per cent of Delhi schoolchildren are obese, and the country has spent over £43 billion on treating obesity-related health problems over the past five years. Since we know that millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition, this seems very odd.

It is hard to define qualifications for the new chairman and director-general of the BBC. Now that I am past being even a joke candidate, I will confess that I once told my old friend Christopher Bland I regretted not having been D-G. He remarked tersely, ‘You would have hated it, and you would have been rotten at it.’ The more we talked, the more I believed him. My own ideal of the D-G was formed as a teenage BBC researcher during Hugh Carleton Greene’s reign in the early Sixties. The function was then plainly understood to be editorial. This has long ceased to be the case.

One of the perks of being a director of a hotel is visiting and eating at the competition. The idea is to taste, look and learn. On this mission, and on the instructions of our chairman, the managing director of the Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire and I met for lunch in one of the most famous restaurants in London. The Devonshire Arms is the proud possessor of a Michelin star, so the managing director and his chef know a thing or two about the job. As I seldom go to London, it is an excitement to see what’s what in the fashionable world. I have known the chosen restaurant for many years, but I am so stuck in my ways that I was surprised by the changes I found since I last ate there.

I feel a bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Having been sucked into a tornado and deposited for almost ten years in a technicolour world of high political and personal drama in the wake of my other half, Alastair Campbell, I am back, not in Kansas but in black-and-white north London whence I came: being a journalist, hanging out with the kids, rarely getting out of my jeans and trainers, even riding a bike, for God’s sake. I have even got my own version of the ruby slippers — a cupboard full of posh ‘state visit’ suits (essential in No. 10) never to be worn again. The thing about politics is that when you’re at the heart of it, everything seems so real and urgent. Once you get out, you realise the extent to which it passes the public by.