Diary – Monday 10 July 1995

Poor old Virginia Bottomley. No sooner is she relieved of her mantle as bogeywoman in chief of the national Health Service – a job most people considered to be the bane of her existence – than she is transferred to the Department of National Heritage, and the jokes and anecdotes about her ignorance of cultural matters start doing the rounds.

The best story I’ve come across was an overheard conversation from the mid-Eighties. Mrs Bottomley encountered the academic and artistic guru Sir Claus Moser, eminent chairman of the Royal Opera House.

“So, Sir Claus, what do you do?” inquired la Bottomley. Sir Claus explained that he had given up his work in government statistics to concentrate on looking after Covent Garden. “How very, very interesting,” said Virginia, vaguely recalling that the fruit and veg market had just moved to Nine Elms. “Has it changed much since it moved south of the river?”

John Redwood may have lost the leadership election, but one facet of his campaign is accumulating iconic status among the Tory right. I refer to That Blazer. The monstrous multicoloured stripy number, the Old Wellingtonian’s blazer donned by Tony Marlow, the Tory MP for Northampton, whose girth, alongside Teresa Gorman’s emerald suit, provided the garish background scenery for Mr Redwood’s historic first press conference. Astonishingly, despite the lampooning of Mr Marlow’s lack of dress sense in the press, blazer sales are subsequently up at The Wellington College Shop. “When I watched the Redwood campaign and saw the old boys’ blazer, I thought it could have interesting repercussions,” says the school’s salesman, “and, sure enough, there has been a burst of inquiries and sales. Things are looking up.”

Potential purchasers might wish to know that the blazer – which is black with yellow, light blue, orange and amber stripes – costs a mere pounds 94.99, and availability is not restricted to OWs. Despite all the criticisms, Mr Marlow tells me he thoroughly enjoyed wearing it. He has every intention of wearing it again. “I wore it,” he says, “because I felt like a bit of fun. I am fed up with the tyranny of the suit.”

I have encountered for the first time Auberon Waugh, acerbic columnist and son of the late novelist and staunch Roman Catholic Evelyn Waugh. We chatted last week about the merits of audio-books, as I had recently heard and much enjoyed the tape of Scoop!, Waugh senior’s masterful satire on journalism. It seems that his son, though, is unlikely ever to digest his father’s prose in this aural manner. “Unfortunately, I cannot listen to an audio-book for more than five minutes before falling asleep,” he explained. “It’s because of my Roman Catholic upbringing.” Pause. “You see, I became so accustomed to falling asleep the second the priest began his sermon in church that now, anybody delivering a monologue has the same effect.”

We may all forget about her as she wafts off into Pakistani obscurity – although I doubt it somehow – but Jemima Goldsmith, or Haiqa Kahn as she is now known, is indelibly marked on the brains of the police in Bristol, where Ms Goldsmith was a student. A former crony recalls that Jemima was recently driving in a new white convertible MG back to mundane university life after a cocktail party in London, when (presumably distracted by heady thoughts of Imran Kahn) she got confused at a roundabout. Just like Sherman McCoy in probably the most famous scene of Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, Jemima took a wrong turn. Instead of driving into the smart area of Clifton, she found herself in St Pauls, scene of the Eighties’ riots and very definitely Bristol’s equivalent of the Bronx. Ms Goldsmith, however, is no lily-livered, hesitant Sherman. Quick as a flash, she picked up her mobile and called for police assistance. The boys in blue arrived and escorted her all the way back home – creating a spectacle that caused certain left-wingers among the undergraduates to “want to chuck into the nearest dustbin”.

At the launch of The Way To Win: Strategies for Success in Business and Sport, a tome by the England rugby captain Will Carling and Robert Heller, a middle-aged business consultant and writer, Heller jovially described himself to me as “the old fart” in the authorial process. Luckily – I turned round to check – none of the England rugby selection committee were nearby to hear him.

Carling was utterly charming. I asked him for a few tips for my forthcoming wedding day, seeing that he had only tied the knot a year ago himself. “I remember being more nervous than I’ve ever been for any rugby match,” he said, “but I did manage to absorb every bit of the day. The stag had been two nights before, so I’d had the Friday to recover – which I’d needed. We started off in Julie’s restaurant in Notting Hill (where Prince Charles had his stag) and finished up in the Atlantic Bar. After that,” he sighed and grinned, “my memory fails me.”

Champagne corks are popping at the London offices of Sight & Sound, the monthly film magazine owned by the British Film Institute. Sales have reached an all-time high of 40,000 – not entirely, it has to be said, because of the efforts of all the staff. Aid has arrived from an unexpected source: the Australian TV soap Neighbours. “In the last month or so we have noticed that for some inexplicable reason every time Ramsey Street’s local newsagent is featured, the Sight & Sound sticker is plastered in the middle of the screen. We couldn’t ask for more.” says the magazine’s marketing director, Caroline Moore, adding more soberly: “We wouldn’t have known if one of us had not been reduced to watching it in slow-motion on the video.”

So folks, this is it. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. You will never have to read my guff about my wedding ever again … it happens this Saturday. The dress is ready (to my dressmaker’s horror it has had to be let out, not in), the seating plan is done, the hat for the going-away outfit is bought and, as I write this, I feel sick just thinking about the whole thing. I have not been helped by my colleagues. Last week there were incessant jests about “lambs going to the slaughter”, “virginal sacrifices” and, to top it all, my present, which I found on my desk yesterday morning, is a book. Its title? How to Do Your Own Divorce. Friends … who needs ’em?

What a Week It Was for … Nurses

Hot Property From Outer Space

How Would You Mark These 14-Year-Olds?

Diary – Monday 3 July 1995

Most people in the Tory party think they know all they want to about Peter Tatchell, the campaigner for Outrage, the action group for homosexuals. But he has one secret that may, I imagine, cause certain MPs to seethe with fury: Tatchell has been accepted into the Army.

Not now, of course (even though, as announced yesterday, an independent commission is looking into lifting the ban on homosexuals), but in the late Seventies. While working as an undercover journalist, he applied for, and was offered, an Officer’s Commission in the Royal Artillery. As a result of his brief but impressive training stint, he was offered a place at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He declined, to the evident disappointment of the college’s powers-that-be; they wrote him a letter expressing their “great regret” that he was not taking up his place.

“I reveal the news,” Tatchell told me, “in my new book, We Don’t Want to March Straight.

Talking of which, this forthcoming book (published 13 July) is raising eyebrows in the publishing world on account of the title’s remarkable similarity to Ed Hall’s new publication, We Can’t Even March Straight (published 4 May), on the same theme. According to Hall, the publisher Cassell was originally in negotiation for his book, but did not offer him enough money, so he went to Vintage. Whereupon Cassell commissioned Tatchell to write a critique of Hall’s work. Cassell, of course, denies this. And Vintage is shrugging it off; a spokeswoman said “Look at Tatchell’s title; it’s completely different. And ours is a serious work.” All very strange.

Still on military matters, on the eve of John Major’s shock announcement that he would be standing down as Tory leader, a body of British war veterans visited the Prime Minister at Downing Street to ask if they might have his backing in their pursuit of reparations from the Japanese for war crimes perpetrated in the Second World War – their court case in Tokyo begins on 27 July. In retrospect, one might have expected Major to be less than attentive. But far from it – he extended their allotted time with him from a quarter of an hour to 35 minutes. “Actually,” says a proud Japanese Labour Camp Survivors Association secretary, Arthur Titherington, “he kept both the President of the Board of Trade and John Gummer waiting outside.”

The burning question remains: who wrote Liz Hurley’s “I am alone” speech? Her publicists, Phil Symes, swear blind that she did it herself – and I am inclined to agree. When I phoned the agency last week to inquire after her welfare, I got the impression that perhaps it was not focused wholly on poor Miss Hurley’s predicament. A spokesman said: “Well, there’s nobody here at the moment. We’re incredibly busy. You see, Claudia Schiffer is in town.”

A year ago, the America’s Cup-yachtsman-turned-millionaire-entrepreneur Peter de Savary swore to me that he would never forget me since he thought, erroneously, that my name was Figgy. This, I should explain, happens also to be the name of his dog – “every morning when Figgy jumps on my bed to wake me, I shall think of you,” he had promised. Imagine my dismay when I ran into de Savary again last week at a drinks party to launch his exclusive golfing country club in the Scottish highlands, and found he had completely forgotten me. Never mind. It was a pleasure, though, to meet his beautiful, unspoilt daughter, Lisa, who clearly carries something of her father’s adventurous spirit in her genes. She had just returned from accompanying her boyfriend, Tim, on horseback around South America. Wasn’t it a bit uncomfortable, not to say dangerous? “But of course,” replied the amiable Tim. “That is why we did it.”

Yet another tale of how legislation emanating from Brussels is frustrating the best of commercial intentions comes from one Mark Vallance, owner of Wild Country, Britain’s leading provider of what is perhaps best described as “outside gear”. This weekend’s Euro-decree stated that mountaineering ropes should be left in “a controlled, humidified environment” for about 24 hours as part of a safety test and that, in order to test ice-screws (used to anchor something into ice), one should “find water of a certain purity … take it to freezing point and then drive the ice-screw in and test the force”.

“What a palaver,” says Vallance, “created by men in grey suits. Frankly, you could use a steel box to test the ice-screws; and as for the rope – what, for goodness sake, is wrong with dunking it in a bucket of warm water?”

On Saturday afternoon, only hours after the erstwhile Tory chairman Lord Tebbit publicly announced his support for John Redwood, I encountered him walking his dog – a nice-looking, healthy-sized kind of collie (not one, I imagine, that jumps all over his lordhip’s bed) – in London’s Belgrave Square. I, along with 250 others in hats, morning dress and the full wedding regalia, was on my way to a reception in Knightsbridge. Tebbit, in a green jersey, was grinning broadly at this spectacle of wealth, materialism and elitism – until a young woman in our midst suddenly yelled out at him, “Vote for John Major!” Tebbit’s mouth trembled, but the grin stayed fixed – accompanied this time by a slow, wolfish licking of the lips …

Boob time, I’m afraid. Last week I chronicled, on the strength of onlookers’ reports, how the British art dealer Anthony d’Offay had caused bad feeling at the Venice Biennale by using the British Council’s phones to make his own deals. Well … poof! My onlookers have vanished into thin air, and Mr d’Offay is feeling rather hard done by since he did not use the British Council phones once – a fact corroborated by Andrea Rose, head of the British Council. A thousand grovels to Mr d’Offay … and a memo to those now-vanished gremlins who swore they saw him using the phone: you were half-right; he did use the phone all day – but it was a mobile and, incidentally, his own.

The long and the short of it: a snippet of gossip hot from Wimbledon. Andre Agassi cuts his own hair. Or at least he is putting out the word to that effect. “Agassi, who does your hair?” a voice in the crowd yelled at him last Thursday. He shrugged: “It’s just a pair of scissors …”

Diary – Monday 26 June 1995

Nasa’s plans for a truly historic moment on 4 July are being held up by a technical hitch. The Russian cosmonauts due to land in Florida on board the US space shuttle, which will have linked up with the Russian space station Mir for only the second time, have forgotten their visas.

Gennady Strekalov and Vladimir Dezhurov are already in space and are not really in a feasible position to nip back home to get them. The American shuttle lifted off last week and so is similarly handicapped. But the American rules are clear; foreigners without visas are deemed illegal aliens.

Alors! The duo apprised Nasa of the situation from outer space a few weeks ago. “Yes, it made things a little complicated,” a spokeswoman said. “They could not have landed. But at last we’ve got it all sorted out. The State Department has organised some papers for them.” What a relief. Would the notion of them landing without documentation have caused the Americans to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, I inquired. “No,” came the answer, “it would have been, er, interesting.”

Last week, you may recall, I described my irritation when trying to pick up my going-away outfit from a top London designer, only to find the Arab socialite Mona Bauwens and a film crew in situ, cluttering up the changing-rooms and hogging the mirrors. Well, knock me down with a feather. Ms Bauwens has written a charming fax to apologise. “I am sorry if my crew and I ruined your shopping afternoon, particularly as it was for such a special occasion. Please accept our sincere apologies. Kindest regards

The most memorable evening of my week was, without doubt, a mind-bogglingly awful performance of Aida at London’s Holland Park open-air theatre. It came as something of a shock, as my party had paid good money – pounds 35 each – for our seats, and spied in the audience a collection of well-known opera buffs, including the former Chancellor, Norman Lamont, carefree before his career took its recent exciting turn. But things looked bad from the moment the pretend Egyptians stepped on stage. “My God,” whispered my neighbour, “they are actually wearing tea towels on their heads.” Worse was to come. For Act Two they changed into sheets. A group of dancers started waving fake snakes around. At least, I thought they were snakes until my fiance whispered: “What do you think the eels are meant to symbolise?” But the biggest mistake by far was for the organisers of Holland Park Theatre to include an introduction in the programme by the Today presenter James Naughtie. It begins: “It’s tempting to use as the test of a good Aida the way the triumphal march is done …” The triumphal March comes in Act Two, before the interval. Suffice it to say that we used Mr Naughtie’s test and did not stay for Act Three. Many others followed our example. Mr Lamont, however, was obliged to remain for the second half. He had no choice. His wife was on the committee.

Given the current political situation I wonder if the Panorama team is kicking itself for not making a documentary about John Redwood instead of its dire programme on Michael Portillo, which appeared last week. Apparently the production team had terrible difficulties getting anyone to talk at all, as Portillo had called everyone he had ever known and banned them from co-operating, so Panorama had to chase off to Spain for interminable shots of wrinkled Portillo relatives. At all the literati parties I attended in the ensuing days opinion was united on how appalling it had been: “Sensational, tabloid stuff,” said one man vociferously. “No decent interviews with anyone really close to him; speculative rubbish emanating from the mouths of those not remotely close to him. I really think a piece should be written about that programme’s demise. I would do it myself, only it’s more than my job’s worth,” said another. And what is your job? I inquired. “I work,” he said, grinning, “for the BBC.”

News of bad form inside the British Council’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale comes my way, I’m afraid. The guilty party is Britain’s leading dealer, Anthony d’Offay, who upset the staff of the British Council enormously by using their telephones all day to make deals. The Biennale, for the uninitiated, is a kind of Olympics for the art world. It is not meant to be commercial at all. Taxpayers pay for the country’s chosen artists to display their work. Private deals are not desired. D’Offay, apparently, takes no notice of such restrictions. “The British Council felt,” says one who witnessed the whole scenario, “like you would if, unannounced and unwanted, I moved in and took over your desk.” Fortunately, I am fairly certain that if Anthony d’Offay saw the untidy state of my desk, he would not dream of attempting such a rash move.

One who made Herculean efforts to watch his country’s rugby side battle brilliantly to victory on Saturday was none other than Bishop Desmond Tutu, whose Christian name will doubtlessly be bandied about among the British student population getting Finals results this week, since it has become a synonym for the “two-two” degree.

Desmond himself was far away from university life this weekend – he was in San Francisco, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the charter of the United Nations, which meant that in order to watch the World Cup final he had to get up at 5.30am and find a pub with cable television. “In the end,” he told San Francisco on the radio, “I went to an Irish pub called the Blarney Stone.” He went on to defend accusations that black people are, in effect, banned from rugby in South Africa. “No, no,” he said. “I myself played in junior high school … I was reserve for the third XV.”

‘I Punched the Skies, as If I’d Just Won Wimbledon…’

What a Week It Was for . . Martin Hinchcliffe

Underrated the Case for Catherine Cookson