Diary

I keep forgetting where I am. A different American city every week makes it hard to remember where the light switch is on the bedside table. Is it up or down, do you push it or twiddle it or is it connected to a more complicated system that you have to get out of bed to operate? The ‘turn-down service’ also seems to be a turn-on service: that’s to say, you come home from the theatre to music, or ‘Mozak’, leaking into the room from an invisible source. Finding where it’s coming from reminds me of the old days, looking for the bug in Prague hotel rooms, but it’s not so much fun. Stopping the music, or calling for someone to stop it, usually takes about half an hour.

Miranda Sawyer’s Channel 4 programme pleading for the abolition of the age of consent, Sex Before 16: Why the Law is Failing, featured the following adults: the editor of a sexually frank magazine for young girls, Bliss; a QC as a legal expert; a child protection expert; an MP; three experts in ‘teenage sexuality’; a liberal-minded historian; and a contraceptive nurse. The aggregate opinions of these experts mostly hovered around ‘empowerment’ and ‘education’, advancing arguments as to why ‘kids’ under 16 years should be trusted to decide for themselves ‘when to have sex’, as it is now so unromantically called. There seems no allowance for the pleasure of romantic yearnings: the mechanics of ‘having sex’ are all.

In all the endless talk about school examinations I have never heard this important point made. It is that ever improving school exam results are the nearest thing yet to a panacea for universal happiness. Just notice how many people they please. Pupils, or students as everyone calls them these days, like getting A grades rather than Bs and Cs. Parents like that too. Headmasters and headmistresses can boast, year after year, of record results, and universities of rising entry standards. Governments like them most of all, because better results prove, of course, that standards are rising and that they made them rise.

This is the best time of the year to be in northern China. The monsoon is over and the summer temperatures are cooling down in Beijing and Shanghai. It’s the best time for food, too. ‘The peaches are in season in Beijing now,’ is the very first thing Fumei says as she greets us. ‘And in two weeks’ time we can eat fat hairy crabs in Shanghai.’ We find acres of grapes and melons being harvested in the Xinjiang oases, the raisin houses are bulging and baskets of juicy figs fill the markets. Trees lining the avenues are bowed down with pomegranates and persimmons. In Anhui province, the rice harvest has been laid out to dry on any available surface — even at the edge of motorways. The third tea crop is being prepared.

I was as excited as a kid going to Disneyland to be invited on Concorde’s last flight from New York to London. I’ve always regarded it as one of Britain’s greatest ambassadors, and we considered that being a part of its final journey was too important a historic event to miss. Percy and I thus arrived at a darkened and seemingly deserted JFK airport at 6 a.m. for a 7 a.m. flight. Are we the first?, I inquired of the charming special services representative. ‘No, you’re the last,’ was the reply. ‘The party’s been going for hours.

An evening of virulent anti-American propaganda at Covent Garden, or rather a terrific Madame Butterfly, brilliantly lit as well as sung. The evening was marred only by the distraction of a madwoman waving her arms at the edge of the stage. This was bootlicking by the Opera House to the Department for Culture. In order to get money from New Labour, every arts institution must prove itself ‘accessible’, apparently to all 60 million people in this island. ‘Sign-language-interpreted performances are part of the ROH’s commitment to enabling as many sections of the community as possible to appreciate and enjoy its productions,’ said the Butterfly programme.

The Man Booker Prize dinner was held on Tuesday in the Egyptian room of the British Museum. It’s something of an ordeal for the six on the shortlist who have to wait until the pudding to hear who’s won. I’d only read one of the books, but they send you a disc of readings from them all, so that when I was asked — several times — who I thought might win I was able confidently to announce that it would be a toss-up between Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood. There was one particular extract, read beautifully by Martin Jarvis, which contained a lot of F-words, which I thought was a cheat. In the course of several interviews outside the museum I said Vernon God Little by a young chap called D.B.C. Pierre couldn’t possibly win. Of course, it did.

Blackpool People sometimes compare the Daily Telegraph and the Conservative party. Watching the heaving sea from the Imperial Hotel in my last week as editor of the above, I do the same. In 1993, two years before I took the job, Rupert Murdoch began a price war. He cut the price of the Times from 45p to 30p. His principal aim was to knock the Daily Telegraph off its perch as market leader. In September this year, exactly ten years after it began, the war effectively ended. Mr Murdoch put up the price of the Times on Saturday to that of the Telegraph. Although the cost of war to the Telegraph was high, we won. The circulation gap between the two titles has long stuck at 300,000 in our favour. The Daily Telegraph stays well on top and the Times has had to retreat.

Did you have a nice holiday? I know I did. Did you find yourself in a hotel bedroom in Naples looking after four children between the ages of two and six? Two girls and two boys, while everyone else went sightseeing. (‘Look! There’s a boy stealing that lady’s Prada handbag!’) The two girls have me as a father, the other two belonged to friends. They all wanted to watch something on television. After about three hours, they all agreed that they wanted to watch an animation they knew by heart called Ice Age. I fell asleep, only to be woken by four children screaming and pointing at the television set. Out of the screen came noises that sounded like someone being garrotted. In fact, it was two lesbians chewing away at each other and making orgasmic groans in Italian.

I recently passed into a new decade. With this passing has come some rather surprising advantages, most of which are of a financial nature. My Senior Railcard, which costs £18 a year and gives me a discount on all trains, has already paid for itself handsomely. I would not have done anything about getting one had I not received a letter from the government telling me that I was entitled to it and also to a cash sum to help me with my heating bills during the winter.

Last week The Spectator interviewed Silvio Berlusconi, and there followed a political furore that dominated the Italian news for – well, at least a couple of days. The cause of the crisis was the opinion of Italy's 57th Italian post-war prime minister on the subject of judges. This is a field in which he is expert, as a result of 500 raids in the past decade by the Guardie di Finanza on the various tendrils of his media empire. Il Cavaliere – as he is nicknamed – told us that Italian judges are 'antropologicamente diversi' from the rest of us for two reasons: (1) they are left-wing; and (2) they are mad anyway. All hell broke loose. Even I became newsworthy.

You will expect me to bore you about my holiday in France, where, like Joan Collins, we found things hideously expensive compared with a year ago. When the credit-card bill arrives, I shall console myself that the euro is now heading south, and that when we return next year everything will be 10 per cent cheaper – especially if M. Chirac sets about trying to bust the stability pact in the way he now threatens. We reached France at the height of la canicule, and noted the daily reports on the television news and in Le Figaro about how thousands of elderly people had died of the heat. When they had to start storing the bodies in refrigerated meat trucks on industrial estates, even Johnny Frenchman's sangfroid went west.

San Andreas Bay Back from a flying visit to friendly, overheated Britain, we begin the annual migration north. Like thousands of other Texans, we are escaping our terrible weather. Some of us go to Maine, others to Oregon. My wife, Linda, and I go to northern California. It's a radical change of political climate, too, and we have to cross a desert or two to get there. The drive from Texas to California can still stir romantic chords: hundreds of miles of semi-desert relieved by an occasional distant butte. This She Wore a Yellow Ribbon territory was once commanded by fierce Apache tribes, like the Chiricahua, who gave us Cochise and Geronimo.

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?