Diary

Naked ambition is harder to disguise in the country. Take the duck race at a neighbouring village f'te. A hundred yellow plastic ducks went whizzing along a turbulent stream. My grandson Phineas's duck was number 94, a prankster who liked to swim bottom up, head under water. We supporters cheered from the bank, lamenting as our duck tangled with a willow branch, rejoicing as he sped on a discovered current. A surprisingly gentle country pursuit, you might think, until I spotted number 94 had joined the leaders. 'Go for it, 94! Squeeze them out, 94! Bash them with your beak! Scuttle the wimps!' Now he was up to third, then second, one bridge to go, a foot or two of shallow and he could win! 'You're the champion!

I was sad to hear about the death of Bob Hope, although hitting 100 is a fabulous record – almost like batting 1,000. I worked with Bob several times on his television variety shows and once in a movie, Road to Hong Kong. In the four previous Road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour had played the female lead but by Hong Kong she was deemed by the Hollywood hierarchy to be too old, so I was cast to play Bing's love interest at almost 40 years his junior. Bing was taciturn and grumpy through most of the movie in stark comparison with Bob, who was a bundle of laughs all shooting-day long. Reportedly, one of the last jokes he made, two weeks before he died, was on his birthday. When asked, 'How does it feel to be 100?

It's no good complaining. The rail network inhabits the wrong kind of universe. If the sun shines for more than two days, the network goes down. You can't argue with science. In the last heatwave I travelled back to London from Brighton in a train whose air-conditioning had given up under the strain. I rang the customer-services office to complain that passengers couldn't even open the windows. Less than a fortnight later I got a letter from South Central. It was not an apology. It was a patronising explanation of the principles of air-conditioning. It doesn't work, see, if you open the windows. The point is, however, that if it is not working, the only way to get some air is to open the windows, or to break them.

As I was staggering round Highbury Fields in a pair of shorts, I saw one I knew and hailed him crying, 'Tom!', because it was Tom Baldwin, the political reporter of the Times and arch-friend of Alastair Campbell. To my surprise, there was not a flicker on those Shelleyesque features. He continued his stride. 'Tom!' I shouted again. Had he somehow failed to recognise me, at a distance of a few feet? Could it be, even at 8 a.m., that he was under the influence of some stimulant? It was only when I started jumping up and down in front of him, sticking both thumbs up, way up, and shouting 'Hey!' that I suddenly understood. He was cutting me. I was being cut dead. Thus has the war of Gilligan's scoop set hack against hack, brother against brother.

I am invited to the Oxford Union to speak in the last debate of the term. I had originally been invited to speak on the death of feminism earlier in the year, but as I couldn't go they kindly invited me back. The motion is less onerous – 'Life is too short to drink cheap wine' – and I am speaking for, along with Peter Stringfellow, among others. I have been preparing for weeks, soliciting everyone I meet for jokes and anecdotes, and obsessively honing my speech. Two days before I'm due to speak I make the mistake of running the final draft past three of my friends at dinner. They think it's so bad that they tell me they're going to send a hearse down to Oxford to pick me up afterwards.

An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s worth it. There’s something called a ‘walking upstairs policy’, which means that no one is allowed to walk upstairs unless they are accompanied by a member of staff. I had arrived before Barbara, who was made to wait until someone could escort her up to join me, while I waited. A gobbledyspeak-trained comis brought some salty thingies to try ‘while you’re wasting your time’.

I am summoned to No. 10 for a one-on-one with the Prime Minister. These 'landscape chats', as his spin doctors call them, are, of course, strictly off the record. But I don't think I am breaking a confidence in revealing that, as we sit on the terrace outside the Cabinet room, I witness a seriously tribal side to Mr Blair which has been obscured in previous encounters. Making small talk about football, I mention that my father played for Newcastle United in his youth. The effect of this revelation upon the First Lord of the Treasury – a lifelong Toon fan – is nothing short of electric. It is as if I have employed some esoteric Masonic handshake. 'I had no idea!' he exclaims. Well, to be fair, why should he?

On Saturday, I shall be beside the Eiffel Tower, hoping to see David Millar win the Prologue of the centennial Tour de France. Until last year, I'd long followed the Tour at a distance, but never in person. Then I was asked to write a history of the race, and to cover it for the Daily Mail, subsequently transferring to the Financial Times on not quite Beckhamical terms. My reinvention as a sportswriter – FT columnist, Tour historian, not to say lecturer on sport in English history at the University of Texas – has surprised me as much as anyone, but very enjoyable it is. The Tour in particular is the most extraordinary of all sporting events, and anyway, if one is going to cover any such event, France is the country to do it in.

The word 'traitor' seems to be bandied about a good deal at present. 'So you're a traitor, then,' said the complacently smiling lady sitting next to my husband Harold Pinter at the British Library literary dinner – rather a surprising venue for such an accusation, I thought at the time. They were discussing our recent stay in Paris. Harold explained his approval of French foreign policy over the Iraq war, coupled with his disapproval of the British action. Then I was alerted by John Guare to the possibilities of www.probush.com. Clicking on the word 'Traitor' produced a rather more sinister result. This voice was male as well as soft and low. 'You're a traitor!' it hissed at me from my hitherto friendly screen. What, me? What is it with us Pinters?

To Gateshead to appear on Question Time last Thursday with Nick Brown, Tom Strathclyde, David Steel and Janet Street-Porter. Until the show is filmed at 8.30 p.m., Nick Brown, the Minister for Work, hasn't been told that he is being sacked in the reshuffle. He certainly doesn't seem to betray any nervousness as we wander over the rather splendid Millennium bridge there, discussing Rupert Everett's excellent portrayal of Charles I in the otherwise dire new movie To Kill a King. Did No. 10 wait until Question Time was safely over before they broke the news? And, if so, why did they specifically ask for him to go on the show after the chief whip Hilary Armstrong had pulled out because of the reshuffle? One for the Questing Vole, I think.

One of the most exquisite houses I know lies at the head of a valley in Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire. It is not so much the 18th-century architecture of Ashcombe, though it is the surviving portion of a once-grand country house, but more the position, secluded and yet facing down the long, twisting valley to the south, surrounded by hills as if in a three-sided amphitheatre. It was once the home of Cecil Beaton and the subject of his book, Ashcombe: A l5-Year Lease, first published in l949 and reprinted by Dovecote Press four years ago. On seeing the lilac-brick fa’ade, Beaton wrote, 'I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand.' He restored the house, which was almost derelict.

Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had 'lied' about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worried and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls 'rogue elements', but their complaints were very sober and unrogueish. They were worried about both the dossiers on WMD, but for different reasons. The first dossier, drafted by John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was, in their view, respectable, but Mr Blair was unwise to have tried to publish such a thing and the Foreign Office should have stopped him. Publication inevitably politicised the intelligence and bowdlerised it in order to avoid compromising sources, and so made it seem weak.

To Paris to attend a convivium on the Continuing Revolution, presided over by Dr Thomas Fleming. Dr Who? Tom Fleming is editor of the monthly magazine Chronicles, based in Rockford, Illinois, and big chief of the palaeoconservative movement – though movement may be too grand a word to describe an engagingly barmy political army that has perhaps 20,000 followers in the US and fewer than 20 here. The reactionary and pacific – but not pacifist – palaeoconservatives (palaeos) are the sworn enemies of the hawkish and progressive neoconservatives (neocons).

Channel 4 outdid itself in ignorance with the dumb, grandiosely titled The 100 Greatest Film Stars of All Time. We tuned in eagerly, expecting to see a cross-section of legendary stars from the 1920s to the present day in fabulous movie clips, and what did we get? Several dozen 'talking heads' purporting to be movie 'experts', interspersed with extremely truncated footage of some surprising stars, accompanied by scurrilous and unnecessary gossip. Granted, many of the heads did know of what they spoke.

The trouble with holidays is that when you return there is the same work to do and that much less time in which to do it; as well as no time at all, in my case, to acquire a birthday present for my wife or take the limping, mewing cat to the vet. My immediate problem as literary editor here was to decide which reviews to print and which to hold. As a general theory I feel that enthusiasm remains interesting, while contempt had better be dished out immediately. My own first book received friendly reviews and then a month later one that only in the last paragraph committed itself with 'This deadly biography....' I had thought the ordeal was over.

I found myself twice debating with Ottilia Saxl, director of the Institute of Nanotechnology, on the radio last week. She assured listeners that I was quite wrong to imply that big business was behind the technology. Governments, she soothed, not corporations, are providing the grants. So what? Governments make bad decisions every day, and most of their grants constitute subsidies to big business in any case. But it's not true. This year alone, multinationals, including arms manufacturers, have already invested more than $1 billion in nanotechnology. Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems and top of America's technological pecking order, told the Ecologist magazine recently, 'We are opening Pandora's most terrifying box, yet people have barely begun to take notice.

This is not a statement that will wring many heart-strings, but if there's one group of professionals which has been a bit down-at-heel in recent months it's libel lawyers. For a variety of reasons – Jeffrey Archer languishing in jail among them – there has not been a queue of claimants outside the Inns of Court waiting to consult eminent practitioners in the black arts of defamation. So the impending case of Galloway v. Moore has put a spring in the step of m'learned friends. For a while it had looked as though we would never again see a titanic High Court slugging match between two veteran pugilists. And now we've got one. Doubtless there is some spread-betting site somewhere on the Internet offering odds on the forthcoming encounter.

As an atheist, I am reluctant to intrude into the private affairs of the Church of England, despite having been baptised into it (I was six weeks old at the time, and had little say in the matter). However, conscious as I am of its residual cultural significance, I have been dismayed by aspects of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. His bleeding-heart views on the late war were only to be expected; it was the extreme beard that really caused me to despair. I consoled myself that perhaps it betokened a proper regard for the ideology of the Old Testament; but I fear I may be mistaken. However delightfully prehistoric it was of Dr Williams to revive the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, it did express a humility that, I am afraid, is probably the last thing the Church needs.

If I meet one more smug, smirking pro-war protagonist who greets me with that 'Hey, peacenik – you must feel a right prat' look, I fear I shall arm myself with a few of those elusive WMDs and take out whole swaths of Wapping, Kensington and Downing Street. If there's one thing worse than the world's most powerful military force waging an unlawful, unethical war against a clapped-out old tyrant's ragbag excuse for an army, then it's surely the quite absurd rash of gloating and triumphalism that has engulfed large parts of our country. I am all for saluting the efficiency and bravery of the armed forces in doing their job, but did anybody really ever doubt that we'd win the military conflict?