High life

A letter to the editor from Frederick Forsyth takes me to task. Enough about Gstaad is its message. OK, but only because it’s you, Freddy baby. Instead, I will treat you to a rivet-by-rivet description of tattooed oiks and thick-ankled slappers puking their guts out in urine-drenched Manchester pubs, my one thousand and one nights of exotic oriental pleasures in a Liverpool nightclub and — of course — my threesome with Ken Livingstone and Nicky Haslam. Incidentally, if you believe that, you surely must also believe Piers Morgan’s diaries. Bloody hell! Why is it that when a diarist quotes others addressing him by his Christian name ad nauseam, as Morgan does, I don’t believe a word? Perhaps it’s just me.

In the American Conservative, Leon Hadar asks, ‘Is it possible that a homeless and failed artist from Vienna, a paranoid gangster from Georgia, and a paedophile and drug addict from Beijing led to the ruin of millions and millions of lives?’ Hadar is reviewing a book by William Pfaff which he compares to drinking a good French wine. ‘You have to be in the right mood and sip it unhurriedly so as to appreciate the aroma and flavour.’ All I can add is that there’s nothing like a good French wine. William Pfaff I have never met and know nothing about.

Gstaad I’ve been wondering how people like Tony Blair, Michael Howard and assorted busybodies would react if some concentration-camp guard sued Ken Livingstone for comparing him to a British journalist. I don’t think there are any German ones around, but surely there are gulag concentration-camp guards still alive and kicking, and most of them are proud of their profession. Go for it, Boris (I mean the guard, not the sainted one); perhaps the Court of Human Rights will hear your case. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. The whole thing has become so absurd; political correctness has forced intellectual dishonesty on otherwise reasonable people.

Gstaad Far be it from me to give advice to the Queen — last I heard she is one wise and experienced lady — but she’s dining this week with the 13-member IOC evaluation commission, which is charged with judging the various bids of cities trying to land the 2012 Olympic Games. Feign sickness, Ma’am, the worst thing that can happen to London after Ken Livingstone and traffic wardens is the Games. I know, I know, Athens were the best Games ever, so why shouldn’t London have its turn? Well, plenty of reasons, and none of them boring. Athens had no Underground, no good roads to speak of, an airport hastily assembled to welcome Charles Lindbergh in 1927, and athletic facilities inferior to those of any junior high school in the great state of South Dakota.

Gstaad Sir Roger and Lady Moore braved a snowstorm but made it on time driving from Crans-Montana. Sir Peter Tapsell flew in from Britain, snow or no snow on the runways. The poor little Greek boy had to travel less than a mile, but was the last to get there. While Gstaad was being covered by the thickest snow we’ve had in years, some 50 lucky souls dined with the finest product of this region, the one and only Ruedy Mullener, the uncrowned King of Gstaad and its environs. The occasion was Ruedy’s 80th birthday, and some enterprising young man should try to bottle him and sell him to Hollywood. He might be 80, but he looks 50, skis as if he were 35, and has the sweet nature, humbleness and wisdom of a 99-year-old.

Gstaad Nothing like the flu to remind one of life’s priorities. It’s health, stupid, with everything else a very distant second.

New York Lest there be some of you that missed it, a lifelong dirty dealer is walking around us free as a bird, and there’s nothing any of us who don’t flout the law can do about it. Let’s start the new year right and not be beastly to Mr Marc Rich. He is the man who was pardoned by Bill Clinton on the last day of the Draft Dodger’s presidency. (Rich was indicted on tax-evasion and other crimes but had fled the United States and was living in Switzerland as a very rich fugitive.) When the Clinton pardon came through, all hell broke loose. It was considered too venal, too corrupt, even for the scandal-scarred presidency of Bill Clinton.

I suppose winning the Nobel Prize for curing cancer would get me more brownie points, but being the man who took Jemima Khan to High Table at Trinity College, Oxford, feels almost as good. She’s something, that Jemima. Thin but voluptuous, with legs that remind me of Marlene Dietrich’s gams in Morocco, that black-and-white oldie in which she follows Foreign Legionnaire Gary Cooper walking barefoot in the desert sands. Here’s a tip for you Jemima wannabes. I waited outside her house, and saw her return dishevelled at 5.45 from some classes she was taking. We were late and I was pressing her.

Back in London for a debate at the Intelligence Squared Forum on the motion that monogamy is bad for the soul. I am arguing against it, as well I should. Had I not wasted my life and time chasing women non-stop, I could have been a contender, a somebody. As the 20th century’s greatest philosopher, Groucho Marx, once said, ‘Some people claim that monogamous marriage interferes with romance. There’s no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.’ Kidding aside, marriage does protect against feelings of loneliness. But that’s about all. Although I will argue for monogamy, I won’t believe a word I say. What I won’t dare say is that monogamy should apply only to women.

New York With the exception of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — whose circle of defenders and sympathisers have just come together at the Museum of Jewish Heritage here for a new documentary celebrating their martyrdom — there is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the patrician, high-ranking state department official who passed government secrets to the Soviet Union. Hiss was exposed 60 years ago and did time for his crimes. The Left, however, always insisted he was framed despite the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. I sat next to Hiss once during a Spectator lunch and caught him red-handed telling a whopper about Bill Buckley and myself. As he was already quite old — this was 25 years ago — I let it pass.

Like everyone else, I might as well get my two-cents in while the story’s still hot. About the sainted one’s problems with Liverpool, that is. What a crock! I might be accused of pandering, but to hell with them. When I went over the top about the Puerto Rican parade some time ago, it looked like curtains. The then Big Bagel mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to have me deported, and all sorts of busybodies got in on the act. But no one from The Spectator forced me to do anything like what Michael Howard did to dear old Boris. In fact, on the contrary, Frank Johnson even went so far as to introduce me during a Speccie dinner as the Puerto Rican ambassador to the Court of St James’s; a very nice touch, I thought.

Boston The Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Universities Conversazioni on Culture is a stimulating series of talks which takes place every year in one of the three venues. This year’s topic was ‘Power Without Responsibility: Was Kipling Right? The Press.’ Yours truly was invited to be one of the speakers alongside worthies such as Andrew Roberts, Kenneth Minogue, Roger Kimball, Renata Adler, Melanie Phillips, John O’Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. I was billed as giving ‘the occasional address’, which was a presentation defending harlots. If you remember the Kipling quote, used by Stanley Baldwin in a 1931 Westminster by-election, it ends, ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’.

New York Except for the people, this is a wonderful time of year to be in the Bagel. Summer’s blistering heat has gone the way of Britain’s Davis Cup hopes — tiny Austria, using natives, has just eliminated big-bully Britain, which was using Gurkhas like Rusedski — the days are getting shorter but crisper, and Mother Nature is putting on quite a display of colours. Shades of yellow, red and gold, and orange are the order of the day. Autumn is by far the most colourful time of the year in the Bagel. It also inspires people. Take, for example, Paris Hilton, the monosyllabic hotel heiress. She has just joined Flaubert, Charles Spencer (Diana’s little brother) and Papa Hemingway as an author.

Athens The first gold medal goes to The Spectator for last week’s leader ‘First gold to Greece’. My country had been unfairly maligned by Western hacks —those pure sportsmen who gracefully hurdle over bar stools while busy filing phony expense accounts — but (with fingers crossed) Hellas has been vindicated. Whoever wrote the leader will feel Taki’s teak deck under his feet sooner rather than later. Before I go on about the Games taking place under the Acropolis and in Olympia, a brief parenthesis about the Mexico City Olympics of 1968. My good friend Jean-Claude Sauer and I had ended up in Los Angeles on our way back from Vietnam.

Gstaad Sorry to bore you, but more about Poles. In all the years I’ve been writing ‘High life’, no column of mine has had such a positive response as ‘Pole position’, of three weeks ago, which is a record for yours truly. Poles in general and Taki in particular are not everyone’s favourites, but this time it seems we’re suddenly the cat’s whiskers. Even here in Gstaad, the Mecca of the nouveaux riches and almost-famous, people have come up to me and thanked me for writing that the Poles are the best and bravest people in Europe. (I thank everyone who has written so kindly, especially Andrej Zatuski, who enclosed his very good book The Third Estate.

On board S/Y Bushido I know, I know, it’s a bit much, filing from one’s yacht — but, what the hell, it’s not every day that hacks own boats. One thousand, one hundred square metres of sail, 125ft-long overall, steel hulled and very fast downwind, she is my latest pride and joy, now that I’ve been shot down at the Oxford Union, that is. Mind you, I began thinking about building a boat only three years ago. All my other ones were hand-me-downs from my old dad. The reason for building from scratch was that classic sailing boats were on the market but at astronomical prices that not even Russian oligarch-crooks could afford. As I love only classic ones, the deal was on.

Athens The birthplace of selective democracy is looking better than it has since the Fifties, when the modernists took over. The ancient capital will be ready on 13 August, the Games will take place, and the American basketball freaks will stay home, which is the best news I’ve had since Bill Clinton was impeached. (His tedious, long-winded 957-page self-indulgence is typical Clinton. Bill Clinton and Ahmad Chalabi, two of a kind, both desperate to win the title of greatest liar ever.) The Games are way over budget, but then they always are. Athens has been transformed by them, and in some miraculous way so have the people. Ten years ago I had had enough. The socialists had come to power in 1980 and class revenge was on their mind.

New York I was a bit tough on American women last week, but when I sat down to write I hadn’t as yet heard of Michael Bergin. Now I have, and I take everything back. Give me a shrill woman talking about whitening her teeth any day. Bergin is the lowlife who has just published a book about Carolyn Bessette, the wife of John Kennedy, who died along with him and her sister in an aeroplane accident five years ago. Mind you, in this Murdochian age, nothing surprises me, but writing about having sex with a woman who cannot answer back, and who died as tragically as she did, must have Dante turning in his grave. If anyone deserves a new circle of hell, it’s this scumbag.

New York And now for Rosebud, the single childhood incident that will illuminate us as to why Saddam did what he did. His was the kind of life Freudian complexes are made of, except for the fact old Saddy had no complexes. If I were to guess, I imagine some North American Man Boy Love Association member abused him when he was tiny in Tikrit. If I were Saddy I'd use that defence in a jiffy. It's got everyone else off the hook, so why not him. Mind you, I haven't seen such chest-banging over his capture since Uncle Sam victoriously invaded the Grenadines, or was it Grenada? Let's face it, even for those who were against the war, like myself, catching Saddam is a hell of a coup, especially as he was the one who personally ordered the Saudis to fly the planes into the World Trade Center.

New York Boy, oh boy! The Christmas double-issues come quickly now. Once upon a time the run-up to the holidays was unending, with non-stop parties up to the final explosion on New Year’s Eve. No longer. Now Christmases come and go quicker than you can say tempus fugit, which in a way is better for Mankind’s fallen condition. Just last week I read that a mob of shoppers had trampled the first woman in line for a DVD sale and knocked her unconscious. The woman’s sister said that the crazed shoppers had ‘walked over her like a herd of elephants’. But, as one Washington pundit noted, ‘elephants do not behave that way to others of their species, even when they’re stampeding...