Rachel Johnson

Try as I might, I can’t pretend even to myself that the Cambridge Union debate against Katie Price was anything but a total victory for tits and telly, and an utter defeat for me. What was I thinking? But still. Last week I found myself at the Cambridge Union in a tight red dress, proposing the motion ‘This House believes the only Limit to Female Success is Female Ambition’ to an overflowing chamber. I thought I made some jolly good points. And Miss Price, in sparkly leggings and six-inch heels, was winningly unsure of herself, and actually delivered a four-minute speech in proposition rather than opposition of the motion. But none of this counted. Our side was crushed.  The headlines were gleeful. ‘The Price is Right!

Is there such a thing as ‘Boarding School Syndrome’? No, says Rachel Johnson  A few months back, I gave a speech in Leeds to the Boarding Schools Association, in the course of which I spoke of the time I was sent to an all-boys prep school in another country days after my tenth birthday. ‘I was cold and hungry all the time: rations were so short that I would huddle under my pink candlewick bedspread, sucking on a toothpaste tube to curb hunger pangs,’ I preached to the choir. ‘I once found a live maggot wriggling in my shepherd’s pie, and showed the headmaster, who advised me to eat it.’ Despite all this, I burbled on, ‘I was happier there — shaggy, plump, and entirely the wrong sex — than I’d ever been.

Leisure and pleasure have always been Scylla and Charybdis for politicians. Vacation on a yacht called Monkey Business, borrow a Caribbean pile from a billionaire, spend time with Cliff Richard, and you’re tabloid toast. Not this lot. The Cameron and Clegg sets have steered through the whirlpools without hitting the rocks. David Cameron, the 19th Prime Minister to have been to Eton, and his Westminster-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, are wealthy, healthy, educated and entitled. They have connections to crowned heads of Europe. But neither is taking the toff path. On paper at least — in the news pages of the dailies — they’re taking the high street, loading the boot of the Espace at Waitrose, dressed in Gap and Converse, somewhere in middle England.

When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman. It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks, and long, gartered woollen socks in amusing colours. A massive cooked breakfast is underway.

Like all red-blooded members of the human race, there is nothing I like more than looking at pictures of Liz Hurley. So this month’s Tatler was a particular treat. There she was in wellies, accessorised by tulle and mousseline gowns in dusty baby-pink. The pictures ticked all the right boxes. Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, in ballgown and Wellingtons in the hen house at Chatsworth? Check! Muddy-hem-and-heaving-bodice costume dramas set in National Trust locations? Check! (The shoot was at Sezincote, Glos, a jewel of a mini stately modelled on a Rajasthan palace.

‘Nice car,’ said my host approvingly, as he saw me off after Sunday lunch last weekend, as the blossom hung heavy on the bough and all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire chorused in the sunshine. I opened the door with pride. At this point I should boast that the vehicle in question is not some hybrid, some gleaming marque of prestige. It’s my husband’s R-reg VW Passat. I swept the litter off the seat on to the floor with a fine, careless gesture before taking the wheel and accepting the compliment with a smile.

The fifth week of continuous downpour. Mouldiest summer ever. The children stay abed until lunchtime. I yell upstairs, Who wants to go for a massive walk? Who wants to come to Tesco in Minehead? Who wants to go to the Exmoor pony centre? There are never any takers. Exmoor pony centre was the scene of one of our many recent unsuccessful family outings, rivalling the lack of success of our visit to the Big Sheep ‘all-weather attraction’ outside Bideford. At the Big Sheep, we drove for two hours to watch a sheepdog herd three ewes.

And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends? So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we? Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a monkey’s.

In thick of whistlestop tour of the US to promote Notting Hell, so the dateline above this diary should read ‘New York, Dallas, Washington D.C, Chicago, Denver, L.A, San Francisco’ which would be a first — for me, anyway. In the taxi to the airport, I compare schedules with the novelist and leggy beauty Santa Montefiore (also touring some cities with me promoting her book The Gypsy Madonna, on our Great British Blondes roadshow. I love it!). I leaf through the bumf and then decide it hasn’t been put together by my fab team at Touchstone Fireside of Simon and Schuster without a map (NY–Dallas–DC??), but by a sadist. There are 5 a.m. starts on no less than five days.

Some people dream of Palladian mansions in Wiltshire, of third homes in undiscovered parts of Puglia, of ozone pools in the basement. Others dream less majestically of mansards and conservatories and allotments. I, however, have a more modest fantasy. I work from home: a semi-detached dwelling I share with three children, an au pair, a husband and a dog. If I did not need an au pair, I could work in her romantic top-floor bedroom with its sweet verdant views over the communal garden.

Mexico City/Punta Ixtapa This summer my family have done a life-swap. Every day we eat a large breakfast prepared by the cook, Isabel, in our residence in Mexico City, while Gaby, the maid, tidies our bedrooms. A brace of gardeners in cowboy hats, José and José-Luis, arrive shortly thereafter to fish out bougainvillea blooms from the fishpond. Another José, the driver, awaits our instructions. A beach house in Ixtapa (which means white sand in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs) is also at our disposal, with a cook and a maid. Not speaking the language, I talk to the staff in pidgin Latin and they reply in fast Spanish. It seems to work as well as any other form of communication. In return, Jaime and Patricia Riestra receive our cramped house in London.

For my son’s eighth birthday, I invited all 18 of his classmates (according to diktat) to his exciting climbing party at the Westway sports centre. I sent a round-robin email to the parents. I pointed out how very easy it was to reach the sports centre from north London. I said that all their sons would be coming home from school that day with invitations to this exciting event. I should, for honesty’s sake, admit that I gave everyone only a week’s notice. ‘As you must know, Saturday is the day of atonement,’ said a mother, as she declined. Out of the 18 boys I asked, 17 had copper-bottomed reasons regretfully to have to say no. I began to feel a bit swivelly-eyed about the party situation.

Rachel Johnson on why so many children’s books are about sex (or ‘shagging’) and hard-core social issues ‘I sit on the toilet, pushing it all into my hand, and then I paint the walls brown. Brown to wash out the white of my anger. Brown to make them hate me. Oh, how they hate me. Back in my room, I tear off my pyjamas and rip them to shreds....’ Well, it’s not nice, this extract from a children’s book called Georgie by Malachy Doyle, I know. I’m sorry to share it with you. I do hope you’ve already eaten.