Diary – Monday 11 September 1995

Forget the statistics, forget the fact that the Bar Council is to consider banning barristers from taking on friends or relatives as “private pupils”. According to Cherie Blair, QC, wife of the Labour leader, Tony Blair, nepotism is no longer a significant problem at the bar. At last week’s launch of Robert Harris’s thriller Enigma, Mrs Blair waxed lyrically about her chambers – in which she is third woman to take silk.

“In our chambers we only take on people with first-class degrees,” she told me, “or occasionally people with 2:1s but they have to offer something else as well. The days of pulling strings are gone.” I did not quite have the courage to mention the name of Buster Cox, son of the former LWT chief, Barry, a great friend of the Blairs. (Last year, Mrs Blair was heavily criticised for awarding Cox jnr an unpaid six-month stint as a private pupil in her chambers. She responded that the arrangement with Cox was separate from the chambers pupil scheme and that Mr Cox was unpaid). But, of her own volition, Mrs Blair quashed the rumour that the Blairs and the Coxes had holidayed together in the Dordogne this summer. “Yes, I heard we were supposed to be in the Dordogne – but we weren’t even in France.”

My note last week about James Walsh, the young man at Tory Central Office who was appointed Gillian Shephard’s special adviser only to be thwarted by No 10 – a memo blocked all Central Office employees moving elsewhere in government before the general election – caught the attention of the playwright Brian Behan who has come across Walsh before. Earlier this year Walsh suggested that “meaningful action” be taken to block Arts Council funding of a play of Behan’s, when he discovered that its plot centred on a Tory prime minister having a homosexual affair with a minister. Walsh got nowhere, but Behan remains somewhat soured by the episode. Indeed, he has written to tell me that he is featuring Walsh in his new one-man show, The Begrudgers, due to run at Brighton’s Nightingale Theatre in November. “I have inserted Walsh into the plot,” he says. “He plays a censor protecting the Establishment.” Needless to say Behan is delighted at Walsh’s career upset. “He has suffered the curse of Behanism,” he says gleefully. “His agony will continue.”

Imagine, if you can, the working day of Julian Satterthwaite, 24. Mr Satterthwaite is the sole press officer for the Lib Dem MEPs – all two of them (Graham Watson and Robin Teverson). “I spend my time issuing press releases, writing articles, setting up meetings, that kind of thing,” explains Mr Satterthwaite in unenergetic tones.

Last Tuesday, however, he was provided with an exciting diversion – “the most unusual event in my career to date”. He was sent a letter bomb. “I went down to collect the second post and saw this suspicious package with psychotic handwriting on the envelope,” explains Satterthwaite. “So I opened it gingerly.”

Brave or stupid? “Well, it was exciting.” Fortunately for the would-be- martyr, the bomb, accompanied with a note stating, “Destroy the European Union by any means necessary”, was a fake. But now he and his bosses are wondering who could be picking on them in such mean style. Watson chuckles: “Finding a bomb in the mail was certainly not the first thing our London press officer expected. He tells me he’s quite happy with constructive criticism but that explosive threats are not really his cup of tea.”

Two weeks ago I told how the Oban Gathering, Scotland’s smartest reeling party, was oversubscribed this year, seriously wounding the pride of 50 hostesses. Spare bedrooms aired, new dresses purchased, they never expected to suffer the social ignominy of being refused tickets.

Now, though, they are feeling rather better. The ball, held last week, was not its usual success. Of the 400 who attended the pounds 100-a-head gathering, a number of unfortunates were struck down with chronic food poisoning. Some fear the prawn sandwiches were to blame. “I don’t know how it happened,” says one eloquent hostess, “but they rendered people so ill that for 24 hours bathrooms from Glasgow to Fort William echoed with the sounds of comestible regurgitation.”

Though he is intent on broadening the artistic awareness of his constituents, I am relieved to hear that the Lib Dem MP for Caithness & Sutherland, Robert Maclennan, knows where to stop. This weekend sees the fourth annual opening of his brainchild, the Northlands Festival, a celebration of the arts common to both Scotland and the Nordic countries. He was worried, however, by an earlier insertion into the programme of a work by the fashionable American playwright David Mamet. The fourth, much-repeated line of the intended play – Sexual Perversity in Chicago – is “Are you ****ing kidding me?” Remember: conservatism in Wick makes the residents of Tunbridge Wells seem positively modern.

“Once we saw the script,” explains the festival organiser, Alan Perrin, “we realised that it was not exactly suitable for a school hall in Thurso on a Sunday evening. The entry has now been withdrawn.”

Breaking out of the traditional fashion PR mould of short skirts, pearl earrings and silk scarves is Julietta Longcroft, 26, who, alone on that circuit, boasts a Cambridge degree. Ms Longcroft has just set up her own PR company, the Communications Store. It is the first PR/marketing company of its ilk to venture into cyberspace.

There is no fluff, no fuss and, best of all, no stream of gaudy, drivelling press releases emanating from her Savile Row offices. “I offer clients Internet facilities,” she says. “It’s cheap and it gives you a far bigger audience. Unlike most PRs, my aim is to be invisible. I can reach people all over the world without actually having to disturb them with a phone call.” No offence to the rest of you, but, as one who gets interrupted 10 times a day, what bliss!

Pretentious, Moi?

Diary – Monday 4 September 1995

There is turmoil verging on revolt in the normally peaceful bastion that was Tory Central Office. The thirtysomethings traditionally prepared to work for menial salaries in return for the first step towards a political career are livid. John Major has issued a confidential memo to all members of his new cabinet instructing them not to hire anyone from Central Office as their special advisers. For one man, James Walsh, 26, it is a particular blow. A month ago, Gillian Shephard rewarded him for four years of hard grind with a post as her man at Education and Employment. Three weeks ago, he held a party to celebrate. But No 10 refused to approve his promotion. He would have to stay put. Mr Major’s reasoning is that he does not want to lose any more of his young bureaucrats from their current areas of expertise in the run-up to the general election. But he has succeeded only in alienating the Central Office youngsters upon whom he professes to rely. “The whole point of working in Central Office is to gain promotion to a special advisership,” said one who works there. “To make an example out of James like this is completely terrible. People already feel badly treated because the pay is so low. Now he wants to take away the chance of promotion. It’s a complete farce.”

Still, the Major memo does not quite explain last week’s seemingly baffling appointment of the staunch right-winger and Portillo apparatchik John Bercow, 32, as special adviser to the staunchly wet Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley. I, however, can.

It seems Mrs Bottomley’s shortlist of 10 contained too many well-heeled middle-class blue-stocking gals for her liking. “Peter,” she reportedly said to her plummy-toned PPS, Peter Ainsworth, MP for Surrey East, after the fifth pearl necklace, Laura Ashley dress and velvet hairband had made its appearance in the interview room, “they are all far too like you and me. I think we need a contrast.” Hence the appointment of Bercow, as happy in a shell suit – he is a qualified tennis coach – as he is in a black tie.

He escaped the curse of the Major memo because he was previously Jonathan Aitken’s special adviser, and before that worked in PR. “Ah, well,” sighed one who was disappointed not to get the job, “if anyone is going to stop her giving money to men prancing round in tights, it’s John.”

In a magazine interview last weekend the former “wild child” Amanda de Cadenet, estranged wife of the Duran Duran guitarist John Taylor, talked seriously about her plans for a career as an actress. “Being a mother on its own was just not fulfilling enough for me,” she sighed.

But I have proof that the 23-year-old has indeed long harboured keen thespian ambitions: she is pictured above, aged 12, in her first ever walk-on part as a conquistador in Benenden school’s 1984 fourth-form play, Inca. Though she did not have a leading role, Benenden seniors remember that Ms de Cadenet brought a star-like quality to the performance. “She ensured she got herself noticed,” says one, “by continually winking at the audience.”

The news that Piers Morgan, the fresh-faced youth who edits Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, is leaving to take charge of the Daily Mirror came as no surprise to senior executives who attended Murdoch’s recent News Corporation conference on Australia’s Hayman Island. Morgan, they say, distinguished himself by the dexterity with which he kept himself out of the conference chamber and inside the bar – all week long. His obvious disinclination to suck up to the media tycoon – an unusual characteristic within the Wapping stable these days – was, says my source, “plain for all to see”.

One can perhaps understand Morgan’s feelings, though. The corporate video of the Hayman trip is an illuminating five-minute film. Set to the song “I Still Call Australia Home”, the camera settles on Murdoch, pans to Tony Blair, resettles on Murdoch, pans to his son Lachlan, resettles on Murdoch, pans to a sumptuous banquet with a vast melting ice sculpture, resettles on Murdoch, etc, etc, etc. If one weren’t conducting the same love affair as the cameraman, one can see that it might all be a bit much.

In the wake of Ray Illingworth’s ignominious dumping of the English cricket chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby, it is a brave clergyman who now thrusts his dog collar into the batting limelight. But marching forth to Pakistan this autumn as the manager of the England A (reserve) cricket team tour is the Rev Michael Vockins, vicar of three parishes in Herefordshire and secretary of Worcestershire Cricket Club.

Vockins, 51, is a tough cookie: more Indiana Jones than Derek Nimmo. In 1986, he led a lost touring team through the African bush in the dead of night, unarmed. “When our host found us, he was horrified to see that we didn’t have pistols,” he chuckles. “As for suffering the same fate as Wingers Diggers, well, I don’t play the same role. I don’t tend to give my men spiritual guidance and they don’t tend to ask for it. They can’t quite forget that whatever else I may be, I am also their boss.”

He may be the author of two highly acclaimed books at the tender age of 25, but none the less there was a momentary choke over the Alpen the other morning when the Swiss writer Alain de Botton found himself referred to in a lonely hearts advertisement. It said: “Three colours red. Alain de Botton, Debussy, Satie. Bookish male, 32, seeks female into the same. Ldn”

“I found it very, very frightening and just a teeny bit flattering,” says de Botton, whose third book, Kiss & Tell, is published by Macmillan this week. “I hope he finds himself a soul mate, although I must say I thought the collection a bit weird.”

De Botton’s own love life – increasingly a phenomenon of national interest after his first two tomes on the subject, Essays in Love and The Romantic Movement – is alive and well. “It was a friend, not me, who discovered the ad whilst trawling through the columns. He then sent it to me,” he assures me.

Diary – Thursday 31 August 1995

Taxi-drivers in Huairou, an hour’s drive from Peking and the site of the unofficial bit of the UN Women’s Conference, have been told to keep their rear-view mirrors trained on their passengers. This is in case any of the foreign women in the back seat turn out not to be delegates but prostitutes who “start to remove their clothes in the car”. Still, they could be forgiven for their confusion over Western sexual ethics. At another of the recent big UN jamborees, speakers from one delegation made a ringing denunciation of pornography. An informant who hacked into their hotel computer informs me that the delegates concerned made liberal use of their pay-as-you-yearn satellite TV channel. And they were not watching the sport.

There’s much jockeying, I hear, in the emergency aid department at the Overseas Development Administration over who should monitor the evacuation of the idyllic British dependency (the politically correct term for colony) of Montserrat, which is currently being threatened by a rumbling volcano. Disasters usually take place in unpleasant places like Somalia or Bosnia so trips to monitor them are a chore nobly undertaken, but everyone is keen to do their duty in the Caribbean.

Most of the population has been evacuated to the southern half of the island because, according to a US management-style analysis of the widely divergent scientific views, the volcano is 83 per cent likely to erupt. But not everyone can be moved there. The ODA has had to spend pounds 10,000 chartering a plane to move the island’s 15 convicts – four have gone to the Cayman Islands and 11 to the Turks and Caicos. No mention of safaris, however.

Plans to move the island’s hospital population are on hold largely because the patients are refusing to budge (the convicts had no say in the matter). Nonetheless, contingency plans are in hand. A hospital on a neighbouring island has offered to take them – but only if the ODA will stump up a couple of grand to open up a new room at the end of the ward. I think one of our men needs to fly out to check that one out.

I think I may have invented a new sociological index. I have been keeping an eye on the tri-weekly movements of places in the Official Ucas Course Guide which is taking up so many of this newspaper’s pages these days. What does it tell us about modern Britain that you can now get a degree in Beauty Therapy, Bookbinding, Celtic, European Studies, Horse Studies, Leather Technology, Leisure Management, Leisure Studies, Podiatry (chiropody to you) and Tourism and Travel?

What on earth are Contemporary Studies (Univ College, Scarborough) Informatics, Mechatronics and Independent Study (a degree in newspaper reading)? What will there be left to rebel about or do in your spare time if you study Popular Culture or Youth Studies (perhaps these will be modular with Artificial Intelligence or Real Time Systems). More significantly, why have all the places in Education Management been snapped up (it was there on Day One and had disappeared yesterday), while there are plenty of places left in boring old Education proper? And where has Golf Course Studies come from? I didn’t spot it on Day One but it has now mysteriously appeared. I think we should be told.

The omission of “argumentum ad baculum” from Professor Ted Honderich’s otherwise admirable Oxford Companion to Philosophy has produced a crop of helpful suggestions from readers. Prof H, you will recall, had forgotten what it meant. The OED says baculum means “the penis-bone … found in all primates except man”. So what could it mean: argument to the penis bone?

An argument which is below the belt, is the suggestion of Daniel Hill. To wit: “not only is your view nonsense but you couldn’t pull a minnow with that tackle”. Or “What do you know about the ethics of sexual behaviour, you can’t even get it up,” as Chris Bolger elegantly puts it. Jonathan Hulme proposes it is a corruption of argumentum ad bacillum – the germ theory which explains why teachers always get sick on the first day of the holidays. Mrs Williams from Llandudno suggests it is a psychosomatic cure for impotence while Ronald Mavor in Glasgow reveals that Baculum was the Roman name for Basildon, the quaint Essex town whose MP, David Amess, is distinguished by the power of his argumentation.

Vicki Stott of Cheadle Hulme defines it as an extension of the common- sense notion that any argument propounded by the male of the species is essentially bollocks. She reveals it is most prevalent in warmer climes where the female of the species wears revealing garments with minimal or no underwear. In such places, argumentum ad baculum is the norm, which explains why American politics is in its current state.

More boring readers explained, factually, that baculum is also the word for a walking stick, and more importantly, for the sceptre which symbolised magisterial authority. Hence, argumentum ad baculum is an appeal to force or intimidation as a tool of persuasion, an argument which in logic is a “fallacy of relevance”. Playing with which, Dr DJ Mela adds gloss about fellatious and phallacious arguments, for which he wins the epicurean bottle of Bollinger (the free copy of the mighty tome goes to Ms Stott). NS Price of Buckingham offers a tortuous piece of reasoning about why he should win the bubbly without a proper entry but there is no prize for being a clever dick.

Labour modernisers have now, it seems, even tackled the musical. On Saturday evening I went with a gang of chums to see Flora The Red Menace at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. It is a jolly affair with the best tap-dancing I have ever seen outside a Fred Astaire film and bravura performances of songs first written in the Sixties by the team who wrote Cabaret. But the book, set in the US Depression, has been updated. The original story was of an innocent young artist who falls in love with a communist activist and is sacked when copies of the Daily Worker are found in her locker, planted by a Stalinist rival in love. In the new version she rejects the dopey, but decent bunch of naifs with a great display of spunky individualism. How far the hand of the Mandelson extends.

Diary – Monday 28 August 1995

Royal Albert Hall administrative staff must be rejoicing that there is, after all, a God. The power-cut epidemic has finally struck elsewhere – Glyndebourne, to be precise. Last Wednesday, an hour before the 5pm curtain-up for Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, everything suddenly stopped functioning – the lights, refrigerators, air conditioning.

The performance was delayed for almost two hours and the side-effects were not amusing. The Moet started to turn warm; men in their dinner jackets began sweating (including, noticeably, the governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George); glamorous women in their Belville Sassoon numbers could not go to the ladies because, once inside, they could not see. And of course, since the bar was completely unprepared for the extra demand, people had to queue for ages.

But the most disastrous news was delivered by a harassed-looking Glyndebourne owner Sir George Christie, after the fault (on an internal generator) had been fixed towards 7pm. The opera, Christie announced, would go on, “but on account of the time shortage … [small, tremulous pause] … those dining in the interval will have to choose one course only.”

Which news, according to my spy, caused the less-exalted and non-corporate picnickers to look very smug indeed.

Have any listeners to Classic FM spotted the mistake in the Rover 800 advertisement? The narrator describes the crowds eagerly awaiting the royal party in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. When a Rover 800 draws up they presume, wrongly, that the Queen & Co have arrived.

A plausible enough scenario? No. Neither the Queen nor the other royal guests ever arrive at Ascot by car – they always travel by horse-drawn carriage from Windsor. Lintas, the advertisement production company, was impressed by my discovery (I felt it only decent to call) but will not be changing the ad.

It has caused amusement at Buckingham Palace, where they did notice the error but politely said nothing. “Actually, I do go to Ascot in my Rover,” admitted a press officer, “but then that is really neither here nor there.”

Time was when schoolchildren received their O- and A-level results behind closed doors. If you did well you didn’t have to perform an ecstatic whoop or a sultry smile for the lurking paparazzi wanting to shove your features on to the front pages of national newspapers. But now teenagers believe that getting a handful of As means automatic celebrity. And if the newspapers are remiss in coming to you, then you, in entrepreneurial spirit, think nothing of going to the newspapers.

Such is the behaviour of 17-year-old Justin Marston. Under the guidance of his proud parents he has issued a press release stating that he was awarded six grade. As at A-level and two grade 1s in A-level special papers. This, according to the self-published hand-out, “followed a week in hospital last Easter on intensive treatment for a painful wrist repetitive strain injury which made writing difficult. Though the injury was related to flute playing, Justin managed to complete music A-level. To ease the pain of continuous writing in examinations he was given a special pen holder, although this was not totally effective.”

Puke-making stuff which, alas, gets worse (youngest ever Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, etc). Yet in the last paragraph it is revealed that this academic paragon has – horror – failed to get into Cambridge. Might this be the reason for the press release?

“Oh no,” insists his father. “I am not waging a campaign against the university. We were just advised to send off a press release about Justin after some of the local press were interested. After all, he is exceptional. His sister – who has just got 10 grade As in her GCSEs, six of them starred – is quite ordinary by comparison. I mean, that’s only GCSEs. We really don’t know how clever she is yet.”

This week sees the perma-tanned American illusionist David Copperfield having another crack at incorporating the UK into his international fan club. His first visit here last year, you may remember, was an unmitigated catastrophe. The British critics, including yours truly, panned the awful vainglorious schmaltz which accompanied his magic, spectacular though that was.

But this time Copperfield has received huge image-restoring aid from an unexpectedly prestigious British quarter – Madame Tussauds. Today he unveils a waxwork of himself there – flying. And no strings.

“It is the first time we have ever had a flying waxwork,” says the sculptor Stuart Williamson. “He is about six feet off the ground with no ropes. To be honest, he looks more like he’s jumping over a hedge than floating in the air, but then I don’t really know what flying men look like. I can’t tell you how its done, I’m afraid. But he did give us some excellent magic tips.”

Evidence that there is veracity in the weekend reports concerning the dangers of new police handcuffs. (They are far too tight, according to Greenpeace protesters seeking compensation for broken wrists, chipped nail varnish and the like).

On Saturday night, towards midnight, I was queuing for the Sunday papers in a newsagent’s on King’s Road, London, when a policeman started brandishing his handcuffs at me. I went into shock and stared dumbly at him. Before I could protest my innocence, he smiled: “It’s all right. I’m not going to arrest you.”

Big sighs all round followed by hysterical laughter from me. “What were you doing then, to frighten me like that?”

“Well, you see,” he explained, holding out the offending chains, “they are locked so stiffly, see, that I was trying to get them undone. But I can’t; so it looks like I won’t be arresting you – or anyone else for that matter.”

Benevolent comment on Virginia Bottomley from Labour’s Graham Allen. As “shadow minister for media, broadcasting and the information superhighway” and thus Bottomley’s sparring partner, Allen has just returned from the Silicon Valley in California fired with techno-enthusiasm. His expertise is demonstrated in an almost unintelligibly impressive essay in this month’s Wired magazine, all about online citizenship. I suggested, mischievously, that it might be a teeny bit high-powered for Virginia to get to grips with. “Possibly,” he conceded, modestly. “But that doesn’t matter. The main thing is, she takes a mean picture.”

people: DEATH AND THE RAVEN

REAL LIVES: PEOPLE

Diary – Monday 14 August 1995

Internal wrangles over the organisation of this year’s Proms are acquiring epic proportions. Last week, I told how the BBC1 controller, Alan Yentob, went into paroxysms over the insertion of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s modern composition Panic into his populist programme for the last night. Now, I discover, it is not the last night that has caused the most arguments, but the penultimate night – Friday 15 September. This time the dispute is between the retiring Proms director, Sir John Drummond, and Italy’s premier composer, Luciano Berio.

Sir John had commissioned Berio to write a new piece, Shofar, for the 15th, which was to be followed by Mahler’s Symphony No 2 – Resurrection. Berio was delighted – until he received an invitation from Sir John, inviting him to a farewell drinks party “following Mahler’s Resurrection”. Berio scanned the invitation. No mention of Shofar. The artistic ego was inflamed.

Berio withdrew his piece from the concert. Deadlock. Then Berio’s PR had an idea. Berio should ring Sir John and say that he was dedicating Shofar to Sir John – not at the Proms, but some time, some place. The newly knighted Sir John was most flattered. The invitations have been reprinted, and Shofar will be played at the Prom. Who, I wonder, will toast whom first on the night?

Talking of fiascos at the Proms… Before the first disastrous power cut at last Tuesday’s prom at the Royal Albert Hall (incidentally, I’m told all those wanting refunds should write to Maurice Scott), I spied a BBC cameraman filming the concert. I was stationed a few metres behind him but, even at that distance, something on his monitor did not look quite right. I leant forward to see better… No, it couldn’t be… surely I must be mistaken. Alas, no. My neighbour tapped me on the shoulder. “That cameraman is watching the athletics,” he hissed.

Michael Joseph’s forthcoming publication of Favourite Family Poetry, compiled by an eclectic list of so-called celebrities (they range from Martin Amis to Denis Healey to the disc jockey Mike Read) contains some amusing reading. Not so much within the verse, you understand, but the index of who chose what.

Newly very-wealthy novelist Martin Amis has chosen Ezra Pound’s “Exile’s Letter” – dreaming perhaps of a future abroad for tax reasons? The former Tory Cabinet minister John Biffen shows signs of nostalgia for greater days with his selection of Browning’s ‘The Lost Leader”. And could the former Labour politician Bryan Gould be commenting on the current premiership with his choice of “The Donkey”?

Touchingly, the late Sir Michael Hordern began his list with “Our Revels now are ended”. But the most self-indulgent (and predictable) by far is Lord Archer’s choice: Rupert Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” – Lord Archer’s home address.

Ambridge fans, hold on to your armchairs. The rumour – and it is one of those dangerous rumours that the Archers actors have all heard – is that the wedding between Caroline Bone and Guy Pemberton, scheduled for 11 September, may be off.

To recap for those who have not been religiously tuned in, Ms Bone is a well-to-do 40-year-old who has come close to the altar several times but can never bring herself to tie the knot. (Her last conquest, the vicar, was ditched just over a year ago – and with a wobbly-voiced final sermon made his exit from the parish on Sunday.) This time, however, great things were expected. Mr Pemberton, wealthy, energetic and possessed of a nice voice,seemed perfect for her. But my mole says the script for early September contains a blazing row between the couple.

Could it really not take place? “I simply can’t comment,” says the producer, Vanessa Whitburn, adding enigmatically: “Remember – he isn’t quite perfect. He is considerably (25 years) older than her.”

I am glad to see that Hugh Grant is abiding by his own advice to audiences to watch his recent film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain “not once but twice” (never mind that he himself failed to make the British premiere for fear of incurring bad publicity).

Last Wednesday, he was spotted escorting his parents (James and Fynvola – Fin to her friends) to the 7.15 performance at the Odeon in London’s Kensington High Street. Stony-faced and garbed in the apparel of a former double agent – baseball cap pulled firmly over his face, glasses shielding his eyes – he looked grim and furtive. Even the usherettes did not recognise him. At the end of the film, he waited in a corner until the place had emptied before making his exit to a white car parked nearby. Poor Hugh! He should realise that not everyone despises him. “If only I’d known,” sighed the female cinema manager when I told her. “I’d have loved to have welcomed him.”

It appears that dating agencies are getting more picky about the calibre of their clientele. A male friend was sent a pamphlet from “The Executive Club at St James’s” assuring him that only “suitable” people were admitted beneath its august portals. “The Executive Club restricts membership to professionals, whereas Partner (their sister club) caters for nice people from all walks of life,” runs the blurb. “Our screening process is thorough and we do indeed turn away people we would not be proud for you to meet.” All those wondering whether they are a “Partner” or an “Executive” are saved the embarrassment of asking. Partner, says the blurb on the back of the pamphlet, “is up to the status of schoolteacher”.

Those who are socially unacceptable, however, must find out the hard way. My friend rang up and under false pretences inquired if he could be admitted. “Clapham Junction trainspotters who still live with their parents?” echoed the woman. “Absolutely not.

Diary – Monday 7 August 1995

Will Carling’s relations with the Princess of Wales are not nearly so intimate as various scummy tabloids have been suggesting. In fact, the two friends might have had cause to quarrel quite recently when one of the Princess’s better secretaries left to work for Carling.

According to my spies, the young lady (whose identity I have promised not to reveal) was showing visible signs of ennui at her royal post – one imagines nail-filing, yawns, etcetera – details picked up by the eagle- eyed Carling. “He asked her, during a visit to the Princess one day, if she would like to work for him,” explains my source, “and that, so to speak, was that.” The young lady, I gather, is now wonderfully happy in Carling’s employ. The Princess, on the other hand has been heard ruefully muttering something along the lines of “Why is it always the best ones who go?”

News from Knin, Croatia, where one of my oldest friends, Roland Dangerfield, a captain in the Royal Dragoon Guards, is the sole British Army officer in residence. He was taking a shower when the war started and had to retreat to his bunker clad in only a towel.

“It has been pretty terrifying,” he told me on a crackly line yesterday. “Now there is only small-weapon fire throughout the day. We’re not entirely sure what it is. It could be Croatian celebrations or it could be Serb retaliation. Whatever it is, I’ve got to stay here to act as liaison officer – just in case the Serbs counter-attack.

“It is very weird being in a town whose ownership has changed overnight. Windows are smashed. There are craters in the ground and, of course, refugees all over the place.”

“Why, though,” I had to ask him, “were you taking a shower minutes before 5am if you knew in advance that was the appointed hour for the war to start?” “I didn’t expect them to start a few minutes early,” he replied.

Back home, his father, Michael, a retired major, provided a further explanation. In the vein of Anthony Andrews playing Sir Percy Blakeney in the film of The Scarlet Pimpernel, he advised: “It’s absolutely imperative, m’dear, to be tidy for a war.”

I know I promised a month ago that you’d never have to hear about my wedding ever again, but judging from my postbag and phone calls beseeching me to give just a teeny post-mortem, I have decided to indulge all of us.

The day went off with only two minuscule hitches. First, my now step-uncle-in-law arrived late for the church and, oblivious to all signposts, parked in the space designated for my car. This meant I had to walk through a small wilderness to get to the church, catching my veil on all sorts of nasty bushes, which flattened my carefully coiffed hair. The real disaster, however, was my “hold-up” stockings (pounds 12 a pair from Harvey Nichols). No sooner had I arrived at the church porch, resplendent on the exterior, than beneath all the petticoats, the stockings fell down. Horreur! I couldn’t get my father or the vicar to rectify the situation, nor could I traipse down the aisle with frilly lace stocking tops peeping out over my shoes. Fortunately, my wonderful dressmaker leapt to attention and with one deft movement – too quick, she assures me, for anyone to see a flash of thigh – she hitched them up again, shaking with silent laughter all the while.

Contrary to what you may have read in other newspapers, it is not the fact that the unorthodox composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle has been commissioned to write a piece for the last night of the Proms that has worried anyone. Rather, the problem is that it will be played in part two, not part one of proceedings. BBC2 (serious, musically intellectual) shows part one; BBC1 (newsy, musically populist) shows part two.

I’m told that when BBC1’s controller, Alan Yentob, discovered that Sir Harrison would be shown on his channel, he went, to quote a colleague, bananas, calling emergency board meetings and conferences with Proms director Sir John Drummond.

Yentob, it is widely rumoured, even went so far as to suggest that if there could not be an interval, there could at least be “a technical fault” blocking transmission during the Birtwistle performance.

All to no avail. Sir John has remained firm, my sources tell me, wallowing, doubtless, in the delicious irony that the Birtwistle piece is entitled “Panic’.

BBC and Proms people deny this – so I’ll be watching BBC1 with bated breath on the night.

You would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to know that John Major is on holiday in the Dordogne. Not a day goes by without somebody writing a piece speculating about if and how he will accidentally bump into Tony Blair, en vacances in the same region.

But there is one, however, who has remained in blissful ignorance of the Prime Minister’s whereabouts. Step forward, Terry Major-Ball, the PM’s brother, who has himself enjoyed a one-day holiday with his wife, Shirley, in Eastbourne. “Oh, is he on holiday?” he asked me, rather surprised, last week. “In that case, I must remember not to call him up in London.”

It has been an unfortunate week for nationwide book retailer Books Etc. Its nominated children’s book of the month, The Garden, by Dyan Sheldon and Gary Blythe, is advertised prominently in all branches with posters showing a small girl in a tent in a garden at night.

The wonder of it is that they say that no customers have complained, in the wake of the horrific murder of seven-year-old Sophie Hook more than a week ago.

“These things are very, very difficult,” sighs chief executive Richard Joseph, who has small children himself. “Where do you draw the line? The posters were printed months ago. It would have been very difficult to find a substitute. None the less, we would have reacted if any of our customers had said anything. The last thing we want to do is to cause offence.”

There’s a Fortune in Them There Hills … Called Water