Tina Brown

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferrable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

From the point of view of New York City, where I live, everything is going Meghan and Harry’s way. News items about their folly vs the worthy Waleses are a standard trope of the US home page of the Daily Mail, but they are the wrong side of America’s zeitgeist. True, no one could have expected a weaponised lady-in-waiting to sink the strenuous efforts to update the House of Windsor brand, but it is also true that to anyone with a modicum of PR smarts, the where-are-you-really-from flap involving Lady Susan Hussey – a Cretaceous-era courtier often glimpsed beneath a flower-pot hat riding beside the late Queen in the car to church – was a debacle waiting to happen.

Santa Monica is a soothing place to be locked down. I moved here from New York for four months in November with my two adult kids after I lost my beloved husband, Harry Evans. I couldn’t face the task of finishing a book in our empty country house where for years we’d shown each other our pages at the end of the day and laughed over chicken pot pie. Meanwhile in Manhattan, I was tired of pretending that freezing outdoor dining, with buses barrelling past, was like sitting on the sidewalk at Les Deux Magots in Paris. With the California sun on my back at breakfast, and the orange trees in my garden, I have the calm I need to reflect on happy times with Harry. The theft of Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs sent a chill through the serenely ensconced household.

It’s remarkable how fast the unthinkable becomes the expected. It felt almost routine to pick up the New York Post last Sunday morning and see the front page mocked up as a wanted poster for Harvey Weinstein and the news that the NYPD is preparing to arrest him for alleged rape. Between the daily barrage of Trump’s lies and excesses and the sexual harassment tsunami, America has outrage overload. The result is that all the predations, political or sexual or both, come close to drowning each other out. Already Weinstein’s legal advocates are test-driving the theory that the Harvey ‘pile-on’ is really about Trump — that thwarted feminist fury at the serial sexual harasser in the Oval Office has flushed out a surrogate who’s even more gross.

It’s remarkable how fast the unthinkable becomes the expected. It felt almost routine to pick up the New York Post last Sunday morning and see the front page mocked up as a wanted poster for Harvey Weinstein and the news that the NYPD is preparing to arrest him for alleged rape. Between the daily barrage of Trump’s lies and excesses and the sexual harassment tsunami, America has outrage overload. The result is that all the predations, political or sexual or both, come close to drowning each other out. Already Weinstein’s legal advocates are test-driving the theory that the Harvey ‘pile-on’ is really about Trump — that thwarted feminist fury at the serial sexual harasser in the Oval Office has flushed out a surrogate who’s even more gross.

I’ve always loved the Christmas (or rather Hulliday) season in New York because it’s so unapologetically, materialistically over the top. You want tinsel? No tinsel is fatter and furrier than New York tinsel. You want twinkling lights? It’s Vegas on 57th where we live. Even tangerines here are shinier and fatter, although some of those groaning fruit baskets that arrive look suspiciously familiar. ‘Re-gifting’ — as the practice of putting expensive presents into instant turnaround is known here — has become as openly acknowledged a seasonal custom as baking gingerbread houses.