Taki

Gstaad   The French have a saying: ‘Il n’y a rien de plus bête que le sourire du gagnant.’ In other words, gloating is for dummies. Hence I won’t be doing it, despite the drubbing handed to the Bercows of this world by so-called common folk. Mind you, at a lunch in a gentlemen’s club in the Bagel on the very day the drubbing was being administered, an Anglo-American friend, Bartle Bull, asked me what I thought would be the outcome: ‘Hung parliament,’ answered the great electoral expert, ruining Bartle’s lunch and driving the rest of the guests to more drink. A month down the road, everything’s hunky-dory, at least for those of us who don’t like to be told what to do by Brussels-based bureaucrooks.

I received my Christmas present earlier than usual. It was a message sent via The Spectator from a gentleman who had been a reader since — hold on to your hats — 1947, when he was 18 years of age. He is now 90 and believed me to be 88. I thanked him and said that I was only 83. The message included some advice: to keep going, and that I still sounded young, and that was it. The best present by far. Just think of it. What the world was like when the nice Bernard Cowley began reading The Spectator in 1947. The French were top bananas in French Indochina, as Vietnam was then called. There was French Morocco, and Algeria was considered part of mainland France.

By the time you read this it will all be over, but will it? I’ve had a bad feeling all along about those who opposed the result of the 2016 referendum. When they don’t get what they want, they play dirty — just look what they did to Lady T 29 years or so ago. And speaking of the greatest prime minister ever, Charles Moore’s biography of Maggie, a magnificent achievement, has left me open-mouthed at his scholarship and ability to write 3,000 pages in such a relatively short time. It should be required reading in schools, but that, in turn, would require students to be able to read and concentrate, something the little darlings cannot be expected to do nowadays, what with Twitter and other such diversions that keep them occupied and as dumb as planks.

How can I phrase it without sounding pompous? When very talented people dine together, it sometimes turns into a contest of wills and wits. Polite conversation, a French speciality whereby you say nothing in very many words, takes a back seat. When talent’s around, look for withering responses and brain-jolting verbal virtuosity. I recently spent such an evening with the actor Harvey Keitel and his wife, the director of Bugsy, Barry Levinson, and the birthday boy James Toback and his wife Stephanie.

No use piling on where Prince Andrew is concerned. It’s a sorry business, and he’s not among the brightest either. Back in the summer of 2007, in St Tropez, I had a boatload of guests and we all went to a party given by the Rubin family in their villa. It was a very gay night, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word. We were joined by a comely seductress from the Far East and the prince with the highest IQ on the planet, Andrew. He was polite but distant, concentrating on his companion. That’s when I told my friend Debbie Bismarck that Andy had no chance. Just watch me, I said.

New York   Things are heating up, in both London and Nueva York, as this place should correctly be called. Two flunkeys writing in the New York Times announced that Boris is committing gaffes and could, like Trump, be a dead man walking. This is wishful thinking and the premature celebration confirms that the media can no longer be trusted, certainly not here in the land of the depraved. (The flunkeys sought quotes from obscure British left-wing academics, and loftily present them as ‘the people’. Their detachment from the workaday world is hilarious.) In the meantime, here in the Bagel an alleged drug pusher looking at nearly 100 years behind bars is photographed walking free and saluting Governor Cuomo for his bail-reform law.

At the time it felt like a century, but it was only 12 years. I began this column in 1977 and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, which meant an end to the anti-communist tracts that my first editor, Alexander Chancellor, described as quasi-fascist efforts to subvert democracy. By 1977 I had been trying to get something published in The Speccie for a couple of years. I only achieved it when I abandoned right-wing politics and wrote about how one could always tell an Englishman abroad. (Brits would use flashlights to check their bill in dark and crowded Parisian nightclubs, making them persona non grata with waiters at Jimmy’s.

New York   What follows will bore the pants off you, but at least it beats another piece on Brexit. Perhaps some of you are interested in old Bagel buildings, as I am, but if Boris doesn’t make a deal with Nigel and the vote is split, I will never forgive those responsible for easing an old Marxist fool into 10 Downing Street. Boris, Nigel, I love you both, call each other. Thank you, Taki. So, about those buildings. The prewar aesthetic of the Bagel’s storied past was one of grandeur, beauty and power. The buildings still stand out as a bygone romance with elegance, as opposed to the ugly cutting-edge of Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry’s modern monstrosities.

New York   A busy ten days, or nights rather, with some heroic drinking thrown in for good measure. Hangovers discriminate against the old nowadays, but no one is doing anything about it — not in Washington, not in New York, not in London. Our former chairman Algy Cluff’s dinner party at a gentleman’s club, followed by an extremely funny speech given by him, started me boozing and things didn’t let up. One drinks to enhance an enjoyable evening, never to relieve boredom. Also one drinks when one can’t hear, as in extremely noisy New York restaurants.

New York   Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work looks back to a time before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish granted by The Spectator it would be for a review by Deborah Ross of the most uplifting movie ever, Ladies in Black, directed by the great Australian Bruce Beresford. My, my, what memories of Australians and Oz it brought back.

New York   A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review of a biography of Susan Sontag in these here pages, my plan was to compare her with another feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (I have just finished an opus about Beauvoir, Paris and the Left Bank après la guerre). My money was on Simone, an extremely promiscuous and beautiful woman who was the first to raise the feminine flag against men’s oppression of the fairer sex. Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in 1949, made her lots and lots of enemies, but it also established her as the number one female icon of the time. Her argument was that men confined women to the role of the other while they remained the subject. When the book came out, there was hell to pay.

New York It’s Indian summertime and the living is easy. There hasn’t been a cloud above the Bagel for two weeks and the temperature is perfect. But the noise of cement mixers and construction everywhere is unbearable, and there is gridlock while the world’s greatest freeloaders are in town for the annual UN assembly. Despite the great weather, the place feels joyless, the media full of dire warnings about safe spaces and racism. There’s something very wrong here. Pessimism rules an anxious, depressed and angry people. Well, I’d be depressed too if I took American media and its pundits seriously.

New York The master of the love letter to New York, E.B. White, eloquently described the city as a place that can ‘bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy’. Like many of us, he believed that the place would last and that it would always matter. White was an optimist, sophisticated and thoroughly American. He was lucky to die in 1985. I say lucky because fate spared him from seeing the wreckage of his dream city. New York was also my dream place, an indelible part of my youth: a poem of steel-and-limestone majesty, of high-end shops, hotels, theatres and nightclubs, of dandies and high-class women, of hustlers and gents, of tall blond Irish cops, gangsters in fedoras, and kids playing stickball on empty Bronx streets.

Gstaad   The cows are coming down, the cows are coming down, and I’m off to the Bagel. My Swiss neighbours have cut, raked and baled the grass that the sweet four-legged ones with bells around their necks will be eating all winter while indoors. They will parade through the town next week, and it will certainly be an improvement after the kind of tourists we’ve been getting of late. Give me four-legged beings any old day — and I really mean that. I’ll give you a brief example. Last week, when I was in the Gstaad local bank, a couple came in and went to the teller next to mine. As I had to wait for something complicated (gone are the days when one could send moolah with a simple name and address), I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation.

He was a Falstaff in his drinking and in his celebration of life, but his greatness lay in his friendships. Like his closest friend Nick Scott, who left us two and a half years ago, he roamed the world making friends and being as generous to them as a fairy godfather. The years, with all their disappointments, teach us caution, but Tim Hoare remained reckless to the end. Here he is in a high life column from 15 years ago: We hit a hurricane while sailing off the Riviera last week, a hurricane called Tim Hoare. I have never in my long life met anyone quite like him. The words, in posh English vintage 1940s tones, tumble out so fast, enwrapped in alliteration and so clogged with onomatopoeia, that a poor little Greek boy like me misses three out of every four.

Gstaad   I was reading in these here pages Julie Burchill’s review of Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in the City? when one of Julie’s pearls struck me like a stiff left jab in the noggin: ‘Those who have persisted in carrying on creakily have become increasingly embarrassing.’ Ouch! Could she have had the poor little Greek boy in mind? Of course not, I told myself, but then again… Never mind. A little paranoia at my age is normal. I felt better the next day when a Dutch TV crew of five arrived in the Alps to film a programme called How to be a Man. It stars one man, me, and it will be shown on Dutch national television, airing in November. Yippee!