Geordie Greig

Unruly children as parents

If as a child you found your parents embarrassing then this hiss-and-tell memoir will make you feel a lot better, as Cosmo Landesman had parents who were off the Richter scale of embarrassment. Jay and Fran were two wacky, middle-aged American egotists who arrived in ‘the land of the stiff upper lip’ and caused mayhem. Blind to their own blush-making toxicity, they were obsessed with being famous. Life at home was like a bad sitcom, as they canoodled with their respective lovers in front of their children’s schoolfriends and then, like some grotesque TV reality show, shamelessly paraded their open marriage to the media, the ultimate examples of the look-at-me-me-me generation. Poor little Cosmo blushed and cringed most days as they rode roughshod over his childhood.

Diary – 16 June 2006

I feel something of a gooseberry as Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher sit snugly side by side on a sofa in the upstairs room of The Ivy. They are sort of flirting, bonding over old times and cold climes as the magic of their relationship is quickly rekindled. At one moment they clutch each other’s hands, giggling at how they fought their corners in their early talks at Chequers. It is moving to see such intimacy and warmth between these two old titans who together with Ronald Reagan literally changed the world. My fellow hosts, Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev, and I all fade into the background as the Iron Lady and Gorby really only have eyes for each other. At 80 she has lost none of her predilection for scoring points, a sort of political love-badinage.