High life

Sartre was a far greater fornicator than philosopher, but he did come up with the greatest truism of them all: ‘Hell is other people.’ (The last line in one of his plays.) Mind you, a Greek savant has bettered him by proclaiming Hell is other people speaking on their mobiles inside an aeroplane. Yes, it has come down to this, or, rather, it has gone up to it. Passengers have been cleared by telecoms watchdogs to use the most malignant device since television during flights. The Dubai-based Emirates was the first airline to allow the suckers who fly it to use mobile telephones last week, which I predict will definitely lead to mayhem sooner rather than later.

Gstaad There’s fear and loathing around here, and it has nothing to do with lousy snow conditions. Fear that UBS, the biggest Swiss bank, is in trouble, loathing for those whose greed brought this about. ‘Reckless’ is now a synonym for ‘banker’ as the financial system teeters on the brink. UBS has denied it is in trouble, but then so did Bear Stearns just before it collapsed. In other words, there is a credibility problem, one that dwarfs Fayed and the Mills woman put together. Asset write-downs and credit losses will continue, according to the greatest financial expert of our times, Professor Taki, OBE, MBE, UBS, JPM, and job cuts and asset sales are a given, always according to the professor. So what else is new?

It would take the greatest bloodhound reporter of all time to discover a person with a good word to say about Eliot Spitzer, the first man ever to bully Congress for an invite on bond insurance so he could meet with cutie-pie Ashley Alexandra Dupré in Room 871 the night before. When the  crumbum finally threw in the towel, the cheers could be heard all the way to Biloxi. Spitzer changed the law involving Johns, making it a federal crime punishable with a year in jail. Which means if life were fair he would have to do at least ten years. (He spent more than 80,000 greenbacks during the past ten years.) Mind you, I’d be doing much more than that if the laws were retroactive.

Around 15 years or so ago I was fast asleep late in the morning when I got an ear-splitting telephone call from Greece. It was Vicki Woods, a Telegraph writer, and she sounded anxious. If memory serves, and it does because she subsequently wrote a piece about it which made it into The Week, the conversation went as follows: ‘Oh, hello, my name’s Vicki Woods, we’ve met a couple of times... ah, at The Spectator.’ Me: ‘Have we made love?’ Vicki: ‘Er — no! Ha-ha — absolutely not! But I’m ringing because...’ Me: ‘Why not?’ Vicki: ‘Well, I’m not your type, ha-ha, too old for you for one thing; anyway, the reason I’m ringing is...’ Me: ‘How old are you?

Who the hell does David Cameron think he is to tell Benji Mancroft to think more before opening his mouth? Did Cameron think when he asked us to hug a hoodlum? I’ve been lucky and never had to go to a hospital in the UK but, unless I was bleeding to death and needed emergency help, the last place I’d choose to be treated would be here. Mancroft was right in what he said about the nurses and the sloppy work they do, but, instead of being congratulated by the Tory leader, he’s told to hold back. Like a true-blue phoney politician, Cameron bends over backwards for the soundbite ignoring that what was said might have needed saying. No Lady Thatcher this Cameron fellow. He wants to be popular with the very people who have made British society the most dysfunctional in Europe.

Taki lives the High Life  An interesting week, to say the least. A Carlton Club speech on multiculturalism which didn’t quite come off, a kidnapping in Gstaad, a party in London to celebrate David Tang’s knighthood, the mugging of John McCain by the man who committed adultery with Emma Gilbey, a great Pug’s club lunch at our new premises, and the addition of two more members to the world’s most exclusive club. Let’s start with the kidnapping, a first for Gstaad. The American lady who was grabbed outside the Palace hotel in broad daylight is married to a Greek close friend of mine who bought Asprey’s last year. He deals in private equity and they were coming to my house for dinner that evening.

Why do children lie? asks a boring headline in an even more boring Big Bagel magazine article. According to the bores who wrote it, children are encouraged to tell white lies, hence they get comfortable with being disingenuous, and insincerity becomes a daily occurrence. ‘Many books advise parents to just let lies go — they’ll grow out of it — the truth, however, is, kids grow into it.’ Dr Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at McGill University, is a leading expert on children’s lying behaviour. She tells the bores that lying is related to intelligence. ‘A child who is going to lie must recognise the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell the new reality to someone else.

Gstaad ‘Let me put it in, just a little bit’ was known as the second biggest lie after ‘the cheque is in the mail’ and it comes to mind when the Archbishop of Canterbury asks for just a little bit of sharia law. Enough said. People far more qualified than me have already commented on the man’s folly, but it is par for the course. We in the West seem to be bent on committing suicide. Sarkozy asks for more mosques in France, some moron wants to sack cops in Britain in order to save money, there’s a brouhaha about the bugging of a radical Muslim MP visiting a suspected terrorist in jail — if you don’t bug those two whom should you be bugging, Sir (to be) David Tang?

Gstaad In the good old days of the Cold War, Athenian hacks used to say that there were only two countries where secrets were safe: China and Greece. In the former nobody talked. In the latter everyone did, hence no one believed a word. I thought of the saying during a chic Gstaad dinner party when people were heard to complain about an article that had appeared in Tatler. ‘How can they get it so wrong?’ was the gist of it. ‘Who has ever heard of these people?’ So out I went and bought a copy of the magazine and read the offending piece. Written by a nice woman, Vassi Chamberlain, it is in the breathless, eager-to-please, hyperbolic Tatler style. Vassi got to the right people all right, but to a person all refused to be named or interviewed.

Gstaad The fat cats were all over Davos last week, greedy bankers, self-important bosses of publicly owned multinationals, craven hedge funders and shameless publicity-seekers such as Bono and others of his ilk mixing freely with Gordon Brown, Al Gore and Bill Gates. No, Carla Bruni did not attend, nor did Amy Winehouse, who had better things to do. Like being filmed smoking crack. Some 20 years or so ago, while in my cups, a lady who used to chauffeur me around suddenly came up with a pipe and offered it. I like to think myself a chancer, but I drew the line at that one. Crack will get you nowhere fast except the morgue. But back to the fat ones. The greed of bankers is well known. This time they managed to surpass themselves.

Gstaad I’ve been watching the Australian Tennis Open on the telly and boring myself to sleep. The modern game is too one-dimensional, the players too predictable. The pumping of the fist after a winner is now de rigueur, as is the tapping of the ball five, ten, in the case of Nadal 16 times before serving. And the rallies are much too long.The only relief from the utter boredom is Ana Ivanovic, probably the prettiest young woman ever to play on the circuit. She has beautiful green hooded eyes, high Slavic cheekbones and a figure which is feminine and to die for. Long before my time, Gussie Moran was the reigning queen of looks — I used to practise with her after she had retired — and, although Gussie was a sexpot, she had nothing on the Serbian siren.

Gstaad The row over Indonesian ‘hobbits’ has split this beautiful alpine village in half. Alas, it began when I wrote something about the Olden, one of Gstaad’s oldest and most beautiful inns and its owner Bernie Ecclestone, of Formula I fame. The Olden had orginally been owned by the Mullener family, since the turn of the last century, and was run by Heidi Mullener for close to 50 years. Her cousin Rudy instructed the greatest Greek skier ever, and, while he was at it, he also turned Sir Roger Moore into an Alberto Tomba double. Now for the hobbits. When Heidi sold the Olden to Bernie Ecclestone ten years or so ago, the consensus of opinion was that he would keep the place as it was, which was perfect.

Although I have to declare an interest, by far the most authentic comments about the Bhutto murder were those made by Jemima Khan in the Sunday Telegraph. As Jemima pointed out, Benazir never repealed the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s ‘heinous’ laws that make no distinction between rape and adultery, failed to pass a single major law and ‘kowtowed’ to the mullahs and backed the Taliban, which illustrates to me the bankruptcy of America’s foreign policy. All style, no substance. If Benazir represented democracy I am Oprah Winfrey. And I further agree with Jemima when she writes that, if there has to be a Bhutto as successor to Benazir, it should be Fatima Bhutto. At least the name matches.

It is that time of year again. The time for peace and goodwill to all men. Mind you, goodwill towards all men is getting harder by the minute, what with those psychopathic murderers in the Sudan and in Zimbabwe. When I look back and remember the rubbish that was written by phoneys like Christopher Hitchens against the great Ian Smith, it is hard to have Christian thoughts. Some might say it served poor Smithy right. He fought for a country which then turned against him and did its utmost to squeeze the life out of his regime. Today’s Zimbabwe is the result, and those who howled abuse against Rhodesia are still around blathering and boring our pants off. A couple of Speccies ago, I read Rod Liddle’s take on the Oxford debate and David Irving.

New York Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But he remained adamant about the evils of American corporations. He blamed them for making America an uglier place to live in since the second world war, a country full of ‘50-storey high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenise our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses’.