The Lost Diaries

SIR TERENCE CONRAN

March 11th

The young Victoria’s life, it seems to me, really begins the moment she sees the super-sexy Prince Albert in his skin-tight figure-hugging uniform and thinks to herself, ‘Hmmm, tasty! You know what? I want some of that!’

The couple fall head-over-heels in love, and simply adore driving around the little country lanes near Windsor in his fast car on hot summer days. They love each other totally, and uncovering that really was revelatory for me. The more I read about her – and in the end I finished an entire biography, non-swanks! – I couldn’t believe how their love was so exactly like my own love for Andrew.

As couples, we were like peas in the proverbial iPod. Victoria and Albert used to eat meals together – and so did me and Andrew. Victoria and Albert used to sometimes go out together – and so did us. Victoria and Albert stayed married until the day he died – and so did me and Andrew, or nearly. Victoria wrestled the whole of her life with weight issues bound up with a lack of self-confidence – and so did me. And, just like I, Victoria eventually went to live in the United States of America, where the people respected her honesty, admired her for her amazing work with WeightWatchers and literally took her to their hearts. The list goes on and on.

SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK

Albert Einstein. Let’s face it, the guy didn’t know the first thing about science.

GERMAINE GREER

March 12th

Violet and I attended pre-luncheon drinks with the Somersets at Gloucester. Then on to the Gloucesters in Somerset. The Devonshires had brought Kent along. Halfway through the luncheon, the butler informed us that Lady Avon was at the door. ‘Tell her to join us!’ said Gloucester, drawing up a chair for her. She sat down and was halfway through her main course (medaillons de veau, pommes Lyonnaises, épinards à la crème – all perfectly eatable), entertaining us with fulsome praise for a new lemon-scented shower gel, whatever that may be, when it emerged that the butler had misheard. She was not Lady Avon at all, but the Avon Lady.

ANTHONY POWELL

In the operations room at Downing Street, the telephone rings. Prime Ministerial aides sigh knowingly. They know from long experience that when a phone rings, there is sure to be someone on the other end of the line.

It is a call for the Prime Minister from someone very important, perhaps even a VIP. According to seasoned observers, Tony Blair has matured in office. He is now very adept, very professional with a telephone. And today is no exception. He takes the telephone receiver in his right hand, and places it to his ear. This way, he can not only hear what is being said, but speak himself, knowing he will be heard down the other end.

‘Hello. It is good to speak to you,’ he says in a clear voice into the telephone receiver. Whoever it is on the other end will probably have heard him, loud and clear. By saying, ‘Hello. It is good to speak to you,’ he is signalling to the other person not only that he is now on the ‘other end of the line’, but also that he is pleased to be able to speak to him. A born diplomat, this morning he is also proving himself a highly skilled politician.

SIR PETER STOTHARD *

March 13th

Riding into New York I was struck, not for the first time, by how busy it is, and how many skyscrapers there are: it’s the city that never sleeps, a bit like Beijing or Vladivostok. Dublin’s quite like that too.

CHARLEY BOORMAN

March 14th, 1960

TO HAROLD MACMILLAN

Darling H,

You were such an absolute poppet last night in Downing Street listening to silly me rambling on about Larry’s deceit – and you so dreadfully, dreadfully busy, too! But if Larry hadn’t promised, absolutely promised, me the role, and then reneged on that promise, I would never have burdened you with my worries, particularly when you were so busy trying to sort out your little Balance of Payments.

I can’t tell you how much I value your friendship – your powers of oratory, your command of politics, your urbane manner, those splendidly coarse yet effortlessly elegant tweed suits and, perhaps above all, your magnificent moustaches. Promise me you’ll never shave them off. They look so very becoming on you – and one dreads to contemplate what lies beneath. My best love to your darling Dorothy, too. She looked so very lovely in that pretty floral dress last night.

Your dearest,

Johnny

JOHN GIELGUD

TO DADIE RYLANDS

Dearest Darling Dadie,

One feels so dreadfully sorry for them both. Harold, perfectly hideous in tweeds, is now something desperately important in politics. He does go on so. I fear that moustache of his has gone to his head. He asks my advice on the Balance of Payments. I tell him that Tony Quayle would be excellent in the lead, with Peggy as second fiddle, but he pays no heed. These politicians are so one-track minded.

Dorothy M was clad from top to toe in the most hideous fabric, poor darling. Had I not known better, I would have taken her for a large pair of curtains and attempted to draw her shut.

Big kiss, Johnny

JOHN GIELGUD

March 15th

Mauritius in March, so many years ago. I was wearing a rather low-cut bathing suit which displayed my bosom to maximum advantage! It was unconventional in those days to wear a rather low-cut bathing suit to a formal dinner party! But then I have always been a rather unconventional sort of woman!

Needless to say, the eyes of the men at the table were literally glued to my cleavage!* So I decided to divert their attention by insisting on a round of silly games!

‘I know what!’ I shrieked, delightedly. ‘Let’s play hunt the thimble!’ And with that I withdrew into the sitting room, and got darling Mrs Stokes, who once cooked her perfect sherry trifle for Adolf Eichmann, to place a thimble down what many have been kind enough to describe as my remarkable cleavage!

‘Hunt the thimble – ready, steady, go!’ I whooped as I returned to the dining room! In fact, I tried to make it easier for them by pointing at the likely area! But sadly not one of the gentlemen looked up, thank you very much!

On closer investigation, I discovered they were otherwise engaged in plopping their ‘members’ (how I hate that word!) on the table to see whose was the largest!

Then they all got out their felt-tips, painted funny faces on them and re-enacted the Battle of Omdurman! ‘I know when I’m not wanted, gents!’ I exclaimed, good-heartedly dipping into my own bosom for my thimble and retreating upstairs for an early night with something milky and a copy of the latest Vogue!

LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH

Find corpse in upstairs guest bathroom. Freak out. Sell house.

KEITH RICHARDS

March 16th

Oh Jasus. Oh Jasus oh Jasus oh Jasus. Oh Jasus. Will you look at that? asks Dad. I look down at me plate. Oh Jasus, he asks, was there ever a child like him for the greed and the gluttony, the gluttony and the greed? And now the others are staring at me plate, and they’d take a pitchfork to me head out of jealousy if we hadn’t sold the pitchfork to Ma McGubbins to pay for the last season’s hay which they needed to feed the donkey to pull the peat to buy another pitchfork to replace the one they’d sold to old Ma McGubbins.

How’s he get to have two peas? says Malachy. Oh Jasus, is tis birthday? Dad snatches one of me peas and cuts it in half, snatching half for himself and placing the other half in his top pocket for safekeeping, alongside last year’s moth. Malachy caught the moth in his sock and Dad said he’d keep it for our St Patrick’s Day fry-up, moths cook beautiful in batter he said though their wings can prove a mite chewy, it’s all that flying they do, Jasus who’d be a moth in this day and age? Malachy says moths are Protestant, ye’ve never seen a moth with a rosary, now have you, he says, but Mam says they’re good Catholics, and all that flitterfluttering is them making the sign of the cross to the good Lord, is it not.

So I’m cutting me remainin’ pea into four and spreading the quarters round the plate to give an impression of quantity when there’s a swoosh from the chimney and Great Grandma McCourt emerges covered in soot, her false teeth close behind. She’s been out whorin’ agin, whispers Alphie. Jasus, how can ye tell? I hiss back. She’s suckin’ on a cough-drop, says Alphie, they always pay her in cough-drops. But is it not a mortal sin? I ask. Will she not be condemning her soul to eternal damnation?

Not for a cough-drop, snaps Mam. Maybe for a sherbet lemon or two toffees, now shaddup and eat your pea or you won’t be getting your mouse-tail for puddin’.

FRANK MCCOURT *

The trouble with staying in places like Windsor Castle is that you so rarely meet anyone of interest. Bumped into the Reagans as I was going up the stairs. Dull little couple. He’s making a goodish stab of being President of the USA, she has a reasonable figure but eyes too far apart. Feel sorry for the pair of them. Should I put him on the board of the Tote? Might give him something to do.

WOODROW WYATT

March 17th

I have always found the look and smell of a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup powerfully erotic, in that noble word’s original sense of ‘tasting slightly of tomatoes’. In the contemporary sense of the word, it is not erotic at all, or at any rate not nearly as erotic as a can of tinned peaches in heavy syrup, one of which I remember taking to the opera and courting successfully in the spring of ‘48, only to be turned down when it came to bed because it had become suspicious of my infatuation with a beautifully ripe pineapple. All full-blooded Englishmen, particularly those of Irish descent, have found sexual desire within their loins for the suppurating convexities and soft, skeiny protuberances of the fruit (originally ‘froo-it’, owing to the fact that, if it had an unrelenting central core, it was hard to bite froo it), and this explains why the Establishment has never allowed a law to be placed on the statute books forbidding full intercourse with any type of fruit.

ANTHONY BURGESS

I collar Reagan over a brandy and give him some advice. ‘A lot of people tend to forget,’ I say, ‘that America’s a very big country.’ He is very grateful.

WOODROW WYATT

March 18th

My God, I despair of women sometimes. My whole life and my every breath has been informed with the imprint of my love and respect, admiration indeed, of women. But for Christ’s sake, they sometimes let me down. If there is one type of woman I hate it is the very thin type of woman. And if there is another type of woman who gets up my nose it’s the fatty. And what about those detestable in-betweenies, those spineless wretches who don’t have the guts to be one thing or the other? They frankly get on my wick. Not until woman can truly be herself – neither fat nor thin nor in-between – can our sisterhood hope to save this doomed planet.

GERMAINE GREER

Time to leave Windsor Castle. I worry over a point of etiquette. How much should one tip the Queen?

WOODROW WYATT

March 19th

You are wrong, I am right.

I am right, you are wrong.

You are Ron, I am Reg.

But who is he?

EDWARD DE BONO *

Pair of Siamese twins knocks on my door, lovely couple of ladies, joined at the hip or wherever, they say we need the media attention, one of us has a tragic terminal illness, the other’s struggling with a tragic drugs problem, we want to strike while the iron’s hot, Max, so how can you help us?

As luck would have it, this very morning my client and good friend Simon Cowell of X-Factor fame had been on the old mobile asking if I knew a pair of Siamese twins he could perform his magic on, so, swings and roundabouts, to cut a long story short I put Simon and the tragic Siameses in touch at a mutually agreed venue of my choice and Bob’s your uncle, the twins are lined up for a major role on next season’s X-Factor, followed by an episode of their own on Celebrity Surgery, I can’t tell you any more at this moment in time but believe me it’ll be dynamite, and between ourselves one of them’s enjoying something of a fling with one of Stephen Lawrence’s young killers, so that can’t be bad, especially if a marriage results, Hello are interested, so’s UK Living TV, you name it, sweetheart, we’re talking mega-bucks. Yes, it’s nice to be able to put something back.

MAX CLIFFORD

March 20th

We invaderate Iraq. Thanks to our courageous actions, today our world is a safer place than it will ever be.

GEORGE W. BUSH

March 21st

I have often heard it said, and sometimes within earshot of the upper echelons of respectable society, that two and two make four. Yet this is quite plainly not the case. How could two and two possibly make four when it is so obvious to one and all that they make six? To put it simply, if I have two snuff boxes in my left hand, and two snuff boxes in my right hand, the total number of snuff boxes I have in both hands is six. Or to translate the same truth into the characteristically modish and inelegant language of numbers favoured by the more churlish mathematicians:

2+2 = 6

Point proven. Yet our present system of egalitarian government, by which is really meant totalitarian rule by the proletarian hordes (many if not most of whom have dandruff), has convinced generations of citizens (their shoes in grave need of a polish) that the equation 2 + 2 = 4 can somehow be made to hold water. Down this path lies madness. Next, they will be telling us that one and one makes two!!!

This grave mathematical deception, from which floweth the depraved and decadent condition of England today, must needs rightly be placed at the feet of Harold Wilson, who, far from being an aristocrat, was the product of inferior breeding, misusing the adverb hopefully and never learning to hold his pipe in a manner befitting a gentleman.

And, forsooth, how much has changed! When I first joined The Times as an apprentice leader-writer in 1950, all journalists on that newspaper were expected, quite rightly, to don top hat and tails at all times. Nor were we permitted to write our own articles, for it was considered an activity unfit for a gentleman. Instead, the necessary pieces were written for us by uniformed parlour maids, whom we would tip generously (sixpence ha’penny every Christmas) for their troubles. Never let it be said that there was a jot or tittle of snobbery about this. Like slavery, it was valued equally on both sides, allowing them to look up to us and, at one and the same time, us to look down on them.

Nowadays, to my certain knowledge, The Times is staffed almost exclusively by common people, many bussed in from the East End in boilersuits. Even Lord Rees-Mogg is obliged to adopt a flat cap, grubby overalls and a cockney accent before reporting for work. And a certain coarseness has crept into the prose. For instance, leading articles on the situation in Iraq invariably begin with the lamentable phraseology, Fuck this for a game of soldiers. It all goes to show that equality may be a good thing in theory, but, like mathematics, it never works in practice.

SIR PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

March 22nd

Nelson Mandela is one bloke I hugely admire. I can’t imagine being locked up in a cell for literally days on end without a personal assistant or even face-cream. I wrote a song about Nelly’s time in prison – ‘It’s Those Little Things I Miss So Bad’ – and I was privileged to sing it at a concert in his honour:

Larked up in jay-ul

Cos my skin’s not pay-ul

Yit’s those lit-tul thungs I myiss swooo bad –

Thwose lit-tul things

That Santa brings

Like dia-mond riiiings

An’ pure gold wiiiings

An’ thwose pearl yearrings I once had

When I finished singing this soulful tribute, I glanced over at the great man. The guy was in tears.

Afterwards, I attended a ceremony at which Nelson Mandela was going to give a bit back to society by presenting yours truly with an honorary degree. It was a marvellous moment as I received my degree from Little Miss Mandela, truly a legend in her own lifetime.

SIR ELTON JOHN

Now I hear that the brave firefighters, lovely, decent lads, are going on strike to try and stop this whole ghastly business of the government’s secret time-changes.

I pop into the local home furnishings store, march up to the bedding counter and ask for some Polos. They say they sell pillows, not Polos, and they show me one. ‘Well, I’ll never be able to fit something that size in my ear!’ I exclaim. What a bunch of proper Charlies!

Eventually, I locate some Polo mints at the sweet shop next door. ‘Do they come with batteries?’ I ask, but it turns out these are extra, like so many things these days. So blow me down if they haven’t even privatised Polo mints! I have no wish to bring personalities into it, that’s not my style, never has been, never will be, but I place the blame fairly and squarely on that smarmy, self-satisfied, grinning lickspittle Tony Blair.

TONY BENN

March 23rd

Buy new house. Find it’s in France. Fuckin drag. Have to sell it.

KEITH RICHARDS

March 24th

TO BERNARD BERENSON

My dear BB,

I must apologise, inter alia, for my tiresome silence. I have now emerged from les horreurs de la term, a pleasing respite, and one that allows me time to devote a generous portion of my thankfully not inconsiderable intellect to the service of this, our most deliciously civilised correspondence.

It was whilst walking round the Christ Church Meadow, and pondering on the complicated subtleties of St Augustine’s theological system, which I had long tried to take seriously, though to little avail (for St Augustine was, frankly, a second-rater, perhaps even a third-rater), that the undoubted truth came upon me that my erstwhile colleague A.L. Rowse is singularly ill-suited to the teaching or writing of history, being dwarfish and plebeian. There is neither breadth nor depth to him, and precious little width or height.

On my return to my study, I set in motion a plot to discredit the oikish Cornish charlatan. Creeping along the corridor on tip-toe, I eased open his door the merest half-inch, deftly placing an open bottle of black ink of the darkest hue on its uppermost surface before tip-toeing back down the corridor again. The entire operation was o’er in something less than a minute.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.