Growing up in the West Country in the 1960s and 1970s, summer left me cold. There was only one place where I could bear to be when the sun shone — the lido at Weston-super-Mare, the nearest coastal town to my Bristol home. Unlike most of the banal backdrops to my childhood, it seemed a suitably grand place in which to plan my escape to get to That London and be famous.

I would swerve my companions — at first my parents, then later my friend Karen — and hide on the upper level of the lido, slipping in and out of sleep in sunshine, dreaming of freedom. There was always voiceless music blaring from speakers — my favourite was a tune which I later discovered to be Dimitri Tiomkin’s ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’, which sounds happy but I later learnt is about living and dying and all that sobering stuff.

I did escape to London at 17. There I lived by night, writing and becoming notorious; days were for sleeping through and the only difference in the seasons was that spring and summer days were unpleasant to have hangovers on, while autumn and winter ones were delightful. I got married, but then in 1995 I fell in love with a girl. During the subsequent divorce, I was surprised to read my husband’s statement that I had had ‘a string of lovers of both sexes’ during our marriage, when I could have sworn he knew I’d only had the one; I lost custody of my beloved son, Jack, and left London for Brighton in order to chase my girlfriend’s younger brother (now my husband of many years) — thereby going some way, admittedly, to establishing my estranged husband’s imaginative claim that I was a depraved person and unfit mother.

In Brighton I’d bought a beautiful big house with a gorgeous garden and a swimming pool in the next street to a good school, as I was sure I would get custody of my son at some point. ‘I don’t mind being an only child because you’re not just a mum, you’re like a sister too,’ he had said when he was seven — that’s how much fun we had together. I was sure there had been some dreadful mistake on the part of my husband and the law which would be rectified soon. Still, we had the weekends and the school holidays — and during the summer, when we visited my parents in Bristol, we’d often hop on the Weston-bound train and go back to the lido. Except it wasn’t the lido any more; they’d concreted a lot of it over so that it was a quarter of the size, and demolished the Art Deco diving board, and amped the water up to bathtub temperature and installed a wave machine and called it The Tropicana. It would have been easier to get a decent swim in a spittoon — but Jack liked it, so I was happy.

When Jack wasn’t with me, I got into fun in the sun in a big way for the first time in my life — it’s very hard not to be a hedonist in Brighton. My existence became a blur of pool parties, seafront bar-crawls and beach boozing; indeed, I became a frantic ray–chaser when the English summer was absent, racing from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean to Tel Aviv in pursuit of some five-star vitamin D. For nearly 20 years, all my summers came at once.

And then my luck ran out. In the five months leading up to my son’s suicide, I’d been on holiday to Barbados, Madeira, Benidorm and Israel. I hadn’t seen him since the summer of 2014, when we had spent a lovely day in the sun — just like old times, before we were so cruelly sundered. When I heard that he had killed himself, I was whooping it up at an eye-wateringly expensive resort in Crete. Even before I got the news, it felt strange being in a place where we lived like lords in our gilded cage, yet found the ATMs empty and the singularly welcoming Cretan people sad whenever we ventured out into the nearby villages. Greece was about to go bankrupt — and so, in another way, was I.

This summer started so well, too. At the start of June I was working on a secret project for the artist Banksy, who had told me in an email that I was the first person who had made him proud to come from Bristol, and mid-month I finally recorded a radio pilot — it has long been my modest ambition to have a radio show with a mate — with my friend Suzanne Moore. During it, I played Donny Hathaway’s song ‘I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know’ for Jack; when the music ended, I was crying. By the time the show was aired, on the final summer bank holiday, he had been dead for two months, so he never heard it. A month after his death, I attended the opening night of the Banksy project — a huge dystopian installation called Dismaland, set right there on the abandoned site of Weston lido, the very place where I spent my childhood summers lazing around dreaming of being rich and notorious.

And now I was. And everyone I loved who I had come here with was dead — not just my parents, which might be expected, but my beloved son. I held Karen’s hand tight (she was now a grandmother!) as we stumbled from attraction to attraction — from the dying fairytale princess to the sun–seeker attacked by seagulls, to my own updated Punch-and-Judy show (Punch and Julie, Banksy had renamed it) in which Punch suggests they cut their baby in half in a grotesque inversion of the Judgment of Solomon. Truly I was living the dream.

Yes, I’m done with the summer, I reflected a few days later as I walked to a taxi in the early morning rain, carrying my ancient, adored cat Sox to the vet for the last time. (I’d always wanted to feel ‘grown up’ even as a ten-year-old, and there are few things which make you realise that your ambition has been achieved more than being the one who must take a much-loved pet to be put out of its pain.) And maybe it’s done with me, forever. I know that the best summer is always the next one, but what if at some point you just have to face up to the fact that you’re in the actual autumn of your life and all this sun-chasing is simply inappropriate?

Blaise Pascal said that ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone’ and I’m starting to think he had a point. I write this on the last day of summer 2015 — the worst one I’ve ever had — and now, finally, after all these years of fun in the sun, I’m going to go back into my bedroom and read. I may be some time. On the other hand, Tel Aviv is lovely in September.

The post Summer’s end appeared first on The Spectator.

I learned from this little lot that if one has read The Diary of a Nobody, then one can derive pleasure from even the most pedestrian life story, as there’s always an unintentional chuckle to be had. The former racing driver Nigel Mansell’s Staying on Track (Simon & Schuster, £20) delighted me with its Pooterish charms, from bullied boyhood :

One time I was due to race for England abroad. The school announced the exciting news in assembly one morning… that afternoon I was attacked viciously with a cricket bat in the playground. I thought the other children would be proud of me. How wrong can you be?

— to triumphant adulthood, bashing himself up for pleasure and profit:

Let me tell you about the time I told a priest to get lost. Yes, you’d think that’s not one of my finest moments, not least because I am not a fan of swearing and I have a lot of respect for the church. However, I do have an excuse, of sorts. I was nearly dead.

I have a crush on Alan Sugar and blush to admit that I bought Unscripted: My Ten Years in Telly (Macmillan, £20) the day before the review copy arrived. At a time when Sugar’s beloved Labour party is so hostile to the likes of him (Jewish, patriotic, go-getting, keen on employing tough women in top jobs), the tale of the boy from the Hackney council flat who made a fortune in computers and then built another career encouraging non-entrepreneurs to laugh at the pomposity and ineptitude of Keystone Kapitalists on The Apprentice — his entire fee going to Great Ormond Street Hospital — is poignant and somewhat nostalgic, as well as a laugh. Sugar’s is a more knowing Pooterism than Mansell’s; there’s a bit in Nobody when our hero sits up in bed thinking of something he said earlier and ‘laughed until the bed shook’ whereas Sugar muses: ‘I can be a little bit witty at times, and it went down well with the audience.’ A triumph. Every home should have two copies.

What makes a showbiz success is not that little something extra, as legend has it, but rather that little something missing. Both Paul O’Grady — a loner in leopardskin — and Steve Coogan — a grudge-holder in high dudgeon — exemplify this overwhelming desire to be looked at, and then, mission accomplished, to disappear and be seen only fleetingly and on their terms. In the case of Coogan this is as a pure scourge of the gutter press (i.e any hack who reveals him to be a rollicking roué — as if there was anything bad about being one) who seems willing, via the vilely self-serving Hacked Off group, to sacrifice hard-won collective freedom for nothing more honourable than personal privacy. Even if I didn’t have a hack-shaped axe to grind, I’d find Easily Distracted (Century, £20) an utter stinker. It’s startling that the super-talented creator of the ultimate manic humbug Alan Partridge has turned out to be an utter Everton mint himself. Like the Grossmith brothers went to work in an insurance office!

In the case of O’Grady — far more honourably — he is now mostly found howling over homeless hounds on prime-time TV; mind you, when you write as gorgeously as he does in the fourth volume of his memoirs, Open the Cage, Murphy (Bantam, £20), drag-cabaret’s loss is the lending library’s gain. No whiff of Pooter here, but definitely a hint of Victor Meldrew in marabou trim crossed with Alan Bennett in a feather boa.

While O’Grady puts his gayness slap-bang in the centre of the pound-shop window and garlands it shrieking with tinsel, there will forever be a whiff of our-little-secret about Paul Gambaccini’s sexuality. Maybe it’s that insinuating voice or those hooded eyes? In the introduction to Love, Paul Gambaccini: My Year Under the Yewtree (Biteback, £20) we learn that if Mr G had been born a girl, his parents would have called him Nancy and that even as a baby he was a fuss-bucket: ‘For the first two weeks of my life I could not keep food down; doctors feared I might have been born with an inverted stomach.’ Whether these two occurrences are connected is anyone’s guess.

And that’s not the only ambiguous organ our hero has: ‘During the 1970s my sex life was limited to women, but my identification was with gay men. It was not until the 1980s that I finally fully made love to a man.’ This is just asking for trouble; sex is, like it or not, the lingua franca of our age, and if an adult man does not assert his preference for either adult men or for adult women, it is likely that society will judge his sexual preference to be animal, vegetable or juvenile.

The police have rather less to do with this state of affairs than the Roman Catholic church of Gambaccini’s forebears and their centuries of hardly hidden child abuse; maybe he should take it up with them rather than the coppers. Gloriously pompous, he asks an arresting officer ‘Is this what you wanted to do when you grew up?’ without apparently seeing the humour in a near-pensionable ‘disc jockey’ telling a man responsible for enforcing the law of the land that his work is worthless. Nice to know that Pooterism is an international language and rolls off the tongue of an Italian-American to the manor born.

There is nothing of the Bard of Holloway about Howard Marks’s prose; it’s far too blunt and elegant for that. ‘It is no secret that a drug smuggler does not like hard work,’ he writes in Mr Smiley: My Last Pill and Testament (Macmillan, £18.99) of ‘the one thing that made me feel truly alive’. But the minutiae of all the endless waiting, tasting, chasing, praying and evading quickly becomes far drearier to read about than a law-abiding 19th-century clerk’s daily grind. Pooter is redeemed from banality by his childlike, vivifying love for his friends and family, whereas every single person apart from Marks himself is a shadow here; only the drug experiences are vivid. This may be discretion, or it may be a blind spot which reflects badly on a lifetime of getting blasted. Anyway, Marks redeems himself slightly at the end by waiting for his imminent death from cancer with a stoicism worthy of the ultimate law-abiding 19th-century clerk.

The current memoir market is nothing if not democratic: reality-show studs and starlets have their allegedly illiterate constituency flocking to buy their hardbacks, while the great and the good boasting huge hinterlands are remaindered within the month. Which just goes to prove — as if we needed telling — that everybody is somebody’s nobody.

The post Celebrity lives appeared first on The Spectator.

‘The day I found out that Suzi Quatro wasn’t a dyke was the worst day of my life!’ a teenage Joan Jett once complained to a teenage me — and, substituting Chrissie H for Suzi Q, I knew well how she felt. Here I am popping up on page 150:

Little teenagers out in the sticks like Julie Burchill lapped up my half-baked philosophical drivel and prepared their own versions of nonsensical tirades for the day when they too could make a ‘career’ out of it. I even sold the darling little Julie my typewriter for £15 when my time was over, like passing the baton of ‘how to fuck off the nation and get paid for it’. She insisted on giving me £17.

I did, however, draw the line at learning the bass guitar, as she suggested, and being recruited into one of the half-baked bands she was always banging on about forming, especially when I learnt that my stage name was to be Kicks Tart — if I’d gone along with her, I might well be dead now rather than enjoying a robust old age. Hynde has survived where those around her have fallen and in the process turned into something of an English eccentric, though I always thought of her as the quintessential American woman — ‘They are a third sex,’ says the Baroness in Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group — and of her music as what might have happened if John Wayne had got down from his horse, plucked up his courage and joined the Shangri-Las.

This is a brilliant read, with no messing about from the very first page:

I couldn’t have told this when my parents were alive, I would have had to leave out the bad language and tell a lot of lies about what I’d been doing all that time I was gone. I’m so sorry for that, Mom and Dad, I knew you were proud of me [to the last]. I never got over losing Pete, never talking to him again. I’d taken him into my reckless world and lost him there.

The shock of shared honesty really brings home how much the vast majority of autobiographies are little more than selfies made script — people ceaselessly posing and preening and, by putting their best faces forward, lying to the reader, but even sadder lying to themselves, and probably not even knowing it — a sort of living death.

Much has been made of the account of the sexual assault Hynde suffered when off her face and sucking up to a gang of knuckle-dragging bikers in her youth; she does write of her culpability in the attack, which has understandably outraged many modern feminists. But it could also be argued that it is not at all feminist to demand that individual women falsify their feelings about their experiences in order to fit in with the prevailing orthodoxy on any given women’s concern. Hynde is, to give her credit, the polar opposite of that Grand Troll Katie Hopkins — she doesn’t say things to get attention, having been the repository of that since her teenage years, due to her extreme beauty and talent. You get the feeling that Hynde really doesn’t want to say some of the things she does — she just has to, in the interests of complete disclosure. She even does it onstage, when she feels most alive and most herself:

We played a lot of student places… every time I would just berate students for the hell of it. I could see people walking out in disgust, but I couldn’t help myself. The more I’d tell myself not to, the worse it got. I was eventually telling whole audiences to ‘Go fuck yourselves!’ whenever I’d smell a burger van.

Even when she gets the genius Ray Davies, one of her musical heroes, as her boyfriend, a policy of complete candour continues. They go to see Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in Private Lives, and fight so much on the way to their own wedding that the registrar refuses to marry them.

I remember being shocked when I found out that Chrissie had left the NME in order to form a band — how could anyone prefer to be a stupid old musician rather than a writer? But as this book proves, she still writes like an angel on angel dust. She is ageing interestingly — not ludicrously, like her friend and fellow animal-nut Morrissey. Long may she continue to exasperate, enchant and evade us.

The post Chrissie Hynde writes like an angel on angel dust appeared first on The Spectator.

On 2 September 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down after trying to explain away his latest bout of sucking up to Hitler and the deputy leader of the Labour party, Arthur Greenwood (standing in for his absent boss Clement Attlee), rose to reply, the infuriated Tory MP Leo Amery shouted: ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ It’s telling that it took the threat of imminent fascism to make a member of Parliament a) speak plainly, and b) offer support to a member across the floor. To this day, such incidents are rare, to say the least. Instead, Parliament is plagued by a ceaseless cacophony of casual cat-calling, rising to a pitch of parasexual excitement when one side smells blood.

Public dislike of politicians has surely been reinforced by what we’ve seen since Parliament began to be televised. When Bagehot said, ‘We must not let daylight in upon the magic’ he was of course talking about monarchy, but allowing the public to peep into where the magic of democracy happens has been far more of a disaster for politicians than it has been for the Windsors, whose way with smoke and mirrors is so arcane that the public will let them get away with any old rubbish. But we elect politicians after listening to their various promises and thus feel more bitterly disappointed by them; all that ceaseless yahooing at PMQs seems to have about as much to do with the everyday hopes and fears of the people who elected them as any given Christmas pantomime. The demonisation of each party by the others makes the House of Commons appear as mature and respect-worthy as a school playground where ignorant armies clash over who gets next go on the see-saw. The idea of the straight-talking politician has become as risible as the chaste journalist or the humble architect.

Which is why I am so pleased to be meeting Jess Phillips, the sparkling new MP for Birmingham Yardley, who had her own Speak For England moment when she showed Diane Abbott the sharp side of her tongue shortly after the election of Keith from Nuts in May as leader of Her Majesty’s opposition in September. Sadly, the words were spoken at a private meeting of the PLP at the Commons rather than in the chamber where we could all enjoy them (she’s only 34; give her time), but they were righteously inspired (by dismay at the lack of proper jobs given by the new Labour leadership to any woman except Abbott, Corbyn’s ex-squeeze) and properly provoked (by Abbott calling Phillips ‘sanctimonious’ — pot, kettle, black-mothers-put-their-children-first — before adding: ‘You’re not the only feminist in the PLP.’)

Enthusiastically adding detail to the exchange, Phillips told the Huffington Post: ‘I roundly told her to fuck off.’ Asked what Ms Abbott did in response, Phillips said gleefully: ‘She fucked off,’ adding: ‘People said to me they had always wanted to say that to her, and I don’t know why they don’t, as the opportunity presents itself every other minute.’ She finished by explaining that she decided to speak out at the PLP meeting on that Monday because she felt ‘alienated from the party’ at the Labour leadership conference on the Saturday, when not a single woman stood up and spoke from the stage.

Abbott, of all the parliamentary prigs who needed taking down a peg-bag or two, certainly had it coming. For years this preposterous creature has blotted the landscape of English politics, speaking power to truth in order to advance her career (she once wrote me a note telling me how much she liked my novel Ambition — I should have written back and reminded her it wasn’t a self-help manual) while presenting herself as a humble sister who lives only to pursue social justice for all. With her vast pompousness (that oleaginous, am-I-speaking-slowly-enough-for-you-thick-little-plebs-to-under-stand, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice, which it seems impossible doesn’t actually leave a viscous deposit in the ear of anyone unlucky enough to hear it), her hypocrisy (sending her son to a private school while criticising colleagues who sent their children to selective grammars), her racism (‘I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children… I’m coming from a culture where whatever you can do for your children you do’, ‘White people love playing divide and rule’, ‘Blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls’ not suitable to be nurses because they have ‘never met a black person before’) and her sense of entitlement (recently revealed as being on the books of agencies which tout ‘celebrity speakers’ for sizeable fees — in Abbott’s case between £1,500 and £5,000 — after earlier this year being part of a PLP campaign to prevent MPs from taking second jobs). Abbott is everything that Phillips isn’t, to which we can add: part of the current Old Nuts’ Network which makes up the rotten core of Corbynism.

I’m early to the restaurant but Jess is earlier. I love punctuality, having discovered over the years that those who always keep one waiting invariably turn out not to be worth waiting for. She is gorgeous, like an overgrown schoolgirl; being with her, one feels, will always have a tantalising tang of bunking off. I’m not surprised when she says later: ‘I was naughty at school — there’s no other word for it. I had three older brothers and my mum whispered in my ear every day, “There’s nothing you can’t do” so I got a bit of a gob on me when I was still a kid.’ She wears bright lipstick but no apparent eye make-up — an unusual look, and one I associate with women of substance such as Queens Elizabeth I and II, Margaret Thatcher and Marilyn Monroe — and big hoop earrings. She’s more like someone you’d see on The X Factor than on the Andrew Marr Show.

Is politics closer to being a religion or a science?

‘A religion — though potentially it should be a science. I didn’t choose to be Labour, myself. My parents gave it to me. My dad’s so left-wing he makes our leader look like a Tory. Though he did tell me I’d never get anywhere with my voice the way it is. But I bloody love it.’

So do I. Listening to her, I’m reminded of how the Israelis always get it right. While a Brummie voice is marked down in Blighty, the Israelis like it so much that a nightclub owner in Tel Aviv put adverts for staff in Birmingham newspapers because his clientele found the dialect so dulcet. Phillips is an excellent public speaker (both passionate and sardonic; an unusual combination) and this is only enhanced by how rarely we hear voices like hers — in more ways than one. I think the Corbynites probably dislike her as much for her dry wit as her independent mind, both of which are obviously abominations to them; in her speech on sanitary product VAT (of which she now smirks: ‘That day… just let’s say it’s a good thing that the House has wipe-clean seats’) she pointed out that ‘Every man sitting in this House is now here because, at some point, his mother had a period.’ Their faces!

I ask her a question sent to me by Catherine Mayer, the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, which I joined shortly after frittering away my vote at the last election on the absurd notion of a Miliband government. (I’m a founder member, but joined at the level just below the one where you get a free Sandi Toksvig book — I may be an idealist, but I’m not an idiot): ‘Does every day feel like International Men’s Day within Labour, or do you believe in Labour’s ability to fix its own gender problem as well as the wider world’s?’

Says Phillips: ‘In the first few days of Corbyn, I definitely felt it was just going to go back to the same old same old — everyone in any sort of job is a man! But now, even after a few months, I believe the Labour party is capable of sorting it out. But it will have to be the women who sort it.’

Do you think there is as much misogyny on the left as on the right? Is it more sexual and vicious, whereas the right is more avuncular? I would characterise it as: ‘Calm down, dear’ vs ‘Die, you bitch’?

‘There’s just as much misogyny on the left as on the right — on the extremes of both, there are strange bunches of people. At the moment, because the left have their messiah as leader, I’m disappointed to see left-wing women settling for stuff they probably wouldn’t have settled for if Blair had tried to do it.’

A lot of Labour people seem to be suffering from false consciousness while, ironically, accusing others of suffering from false consciousness. They feel that people who disagree with them are misinformed about Labour policies rather than being quite well-informed enough, thank you, and rejecting them. Do you think that Labour leaders need to stop lecturing and start listening?

‘Yes. Not just under Corbyn, but under Miliband, Labour behaved quite like a teenager who had just become a vegetarian, or just discovered sex. We’re not better than people. We are people, and until we stop lecturing people about how good you’ve got to be, people will just turn off — and the people we desperately need not to turn off are the people who aren’t tribally Labour. My mum and dad argued a lot over Blair — it was quite a thing in our house. My dad couldn’t stomach him, but my mum kept saying, “We have to win — we need to win. We can take it from there!’’ ’

Why do you think the Tory party has had female and gay leaders while the alleged party of diversity and equality is invariably led by white men?

‘It’s the structural sexism in all the groups that go to make up Labour. But it’s a massive, massive, massive disappointment that we’ve somehow allowed all the other parties to run away with this. It’s like people on the left are champions of equality until they see that some of their power is being taken away from them — whereas the Tories willingly gave it over.’

The waiter brings her the wrong thing and she beams at him as if he’s presented her with a longed-for gift. I’ve sat with a lot of politicians in quite a few restaurants in my time and the old saw about judging people by how they treat waiters has rarely seemed more telling. I still wince three decades on at the mortifying memory of the time a Tory grandee, who I had been sent to have dinner with at Le Caprice in my capacity as a political columnist, insisted that waiters move a happy family (mid-champagne toast!) on to a less well-appointed table as the one they had the nerve to be enjoying themselves on was ‘his’.

‘You were a victims’ advocate,’ I point out. ‘Do you think Labour suffers from being seen as a party with more concern for criminals than their victims?’

‘I was always a typical lefty, everybody-deserves-a-second-chance type — and to some extent I still am. But when I started working in a domestic violence refuge I became very aware of men who had committed a dozen acts of violence against women being let off, basically, and put into perpetrators’ programmes. It does make you want to cut their balls off. Lock them up, then educate them.’

Do you get called a Tory a lot?

‘All day, every day, especially on Twitter. I get a lot of abuse from both sides — from the Corbynites who won’t ever forgive me for voting for Yvette Cooper, and from the men’s rights mob who won’t ever forgive me for laughing at Philip Davies. But it doesn’t bother me a bit. I’ll be on the train, with my work done, and I’ll turn my phone on just to check how the abuse is coming along: ‘Right, I’ve got half an hour — amuse me!’

‘I was raised to hate Tories; in our house Tory was a swear word. But since I got into the Commons I’ve met so many nice ones, who care about their communities, who care about women’s rights. Some of their feminists are very “strident”! she laughs. ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg, for instance, is great — very funny and kind. The first time he opened a car door for me, I just stood there, shocked. He said: “Doesn’t your husband do that?” I said: “It would be a ruddy long school run if he did!”’

Do you ever get mistaken for a non-Honourable Member at the Commons because you’re so young and cute? ‘A bit.’ (I like that she doesn’t say: ‘I’m not young and cute!’ — no false modesty here.) ‘Sometimes visitors to the House will say, “Who do you work for?” I just smile and say, “I work for the people of Birmingham Yardley.’’ ’

This past election, I voted as always for Labour; tribally, like Phillips. It’s all I can do. But the day after, at a pub rally to celebrate the first-time win of Peter Kyle, my excellent local Labour MP, I was also drinking to celebrate the Tories winning, and to drown my sorrows in knowing that if my party went on to elect a leader even less fit for purpose than Miliband, I’d have to abstain next time. I’ve always been fascinated by those poor souls who somehow manage to run themselves over with their own cars — Brian Harvey of East 17 did it — and I always think of that now when I consider the Keystone Kommunism of Comrade Corbyn; a little man soon to go under the wheels of a big vehicle which he cannot hope to properly drive. But a few more like Jess Phillips — a breath of fresh air with a dirty laugh, Mrs Pankhurst meets Tigger in Topshop, cute enough to leave home for and clever enough to make lost voters go home to Labour — and such humiliating hangovers will hopefully be a thing of the past.

‘Who’s that girl?’ the taxi driver asks me after Jess alights. ‘Is she famous? She’s got something about her. Do I know her?’

‘You will soon,’ I swoon as she sashays away to serve it to both sides. ‘That’s Jess Phillips, MP. She’s going to be leader of the Labour party one day!’

The post Lunch with the future leader of the Labour party appeared first on The Spectator.

My word, I do like the French! That’s up there with things I thought I’d never say, like ‘Just the one, please.’ But after spending three days in Paris two weeks after the Islamist massacre, I have become their biggest fan. Yes, I’m fully aware that the Parisiennes aren’t the French –— but the pedants among you will please overlook the sweeping generalisation.

I thought it was important, having read that France had already lost €2 million worth of business due to a wave of cancellations, to show support. When I read that Parisiennes were trending the hashtag ‘#ToutsAuBistrot’, it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we arrived on the first day of the climate conference, and the motorways were closed. Never mind; the trains were free, and it felt thrillingly cosmopolitan to just rush through the barriers. All was fine until a group of black and Arabic youngsters got on; the looks they received from the commuters could have cooled down an Ibizan foam party. Ever keen to do my bit for inter-faith relations, I wriggled a little closer to the young North African man sitting next to me and received a lovely smile. I thought I was being Ban Ki-moon, but it’s likely that I was mistaken for a sozzled middle-aged slapper up for a bit of fun.

It took quite a while to find our hotel, and at this time we assumed that the Parisiennes were still their same old snooty selves. The police and the taxi drivers did that famous thing where they pretend not to understand when you talk French to them: they all gave my husband the same blank look until he wrote it down, at which point they all went ‘Ah! Rue — d’Anjou!’ exactly the way he’d said it in the first place. We were excited when we finally found the Buddha-Bar Hotel, though — all red, black and darkness, with an atmosphere of filthy deeds done at an extortionate price.

My husband was both appalled and amused by the space-age lavatory and its saucy pre-warmed seat. To recover, we went, as the hashtag instructs, to the bar. I’ve been to a few bars in my life, but this was one of the loveliest ever; a sort of dark fairytale, as if the gingerbread house from ‘Hansel and Gretel’ had been repurposed as a Shanghai opium den.

In the morning we walk along by a deserted Seine — Paris seems empty except for us and the Chinese tourists, who are made of stern stuff. Around ten we start bar-crawling in earnest and it was quite freaky at first for an English accent to be greeted with a shocked smile and a painstaking ‘Cheers!’ instead of a sneer. The gargantuan measures, the bottles given where a couple of glasses were bought, the waiter who called out as we left ‘We love you very much for coming!’ Yes, there are a few pleasingly multi-hued paratroopers in the street, but then I am a seasoned Israel-tripper who feels happy rather than disturbed by the sight of a democratic state defending the streets where its citizens live free lives. At noon we stop at La Cour De Rome –— a visibly touristy joint, except that we are the only visible tourists there. We eat onion soup and Roquefort and drink red wine and listen to everyone talking French around us, gesturing, shrugging, and obviously just out for their lunch hour. Clichés have never seemed so liberating.

On the last morning of our stay, I ask two Facebook friends to lunch at the Buddha Bar. Aidan is an excellent biker and blogger (www.castacoldi.wordpress.com) while Anne-Elisabeth is exactly how one expects a beautiful, brilliant Parisienne journaliste of a certain age (mine) to look. Yesterday, although an atheist, Aidan had knelt in the Sacré-Coeur cathedral and said a prayer for the souls of the murdered; after we left, he met a Texan lady who has lived in Paris for 30 years. Aidan wrote later: ‘She said something which hit home — “The blood dries quickly on the streets.” It wasn’t cruel or callous, but defiant.’

Anne-Elisabeth tells me we have history; 30 years ago I wrote about how I loathed the French, and she wrote a reply. I tell her I’ve changed my mind, and start drooling about how wonderful the French are — starting with the long queue at passport control, where all the children were well-behaved, most of them quietly reading books, like lovely little adults. If that queue had included English kids, I tut, it would have been bedlam. She rolls her eyes in a very elegant French way: ‘O, Ju-lee! Not too much the other way, eh?’

I left Paris the way I like to leave a holiday — with a light wallet and an enlarged liver. But this time also with a new feeling of affection and respect for our old enemy and eternal ally. ‘Here’s one the Boche won’t drink!’ was a toast we’d been taught. Here’s one Daesh won’t conquer, I thought, looking out of the aeroplane window as the sunset turned the sky into a Tricolor.

The post France: #ToutsAuBistrot! appeared first on The Spectator.

My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when I started going to house parties on the notorious Whitehawk estate. The old Cockney phrase ‘You think your aunt’s come up from Brighton!’ to denote a person who is free and easy with their money pays tribute to this agreeable state of affairs.

But although B&H may appear affluent, it hasn’t really been posh since the Prince Regent pushed off. There’s always been something disreputable and no better than it should be about the money washing about here, coming as it does from every ne’er-do-well from theatricals to gangsters — as the late longtime resident Keith Waterhouse put it, ‘Brighton looks as though it is a town helping the police with their enquiries.’ Even our most famous peer — Lord Olivier of Brighton — was a bisexual actor married to an insane nymphomaniac; hardly the stuff of Debrett’s.

My husband has lived in Brighton since he was a tot, and says that it was always a pretty mixed place, class-wise. Until a few years back, that is, when the voices of the young people in pubs and clubs just got posher and posher. These are generally students from Sussex University — one of several institutions of higher and further education in a relatively small place — which, from being a hotbed of revolution in earlier times, has now become very ‘social’.

And they’re the most irritating type of young toff — the kind who think they’re carefree hippies, but are even more entitled and unapologetic about their privilege than their parents. I call them the Shrieking Violets, as they often have Victorian parlourmaid names: Violet, Lily, Daisy.

Because of all the college and university education going on here, buy-to-let is having a real moment in Brighton, with landlords cramming as many students as they can into houses built for one family — not just around the universities and centre but right up into the suburbs of the city. I’ve had many friends who’ve suffered from student neighbours over the past few years — the usual eardrum-busting music and knock-down rows from 9 (p.m.) till 5 (a.m.) — but never as nastily as what kicked off in my best friend’s street last month.

My friend, who is disabled, bought a three-bedroomed house in a fairly rundown but respectable neighbourhood in 2009 with money that her mother left her, having lived in council houses for most of her adult life. She, her shy young daughter and her severely disabled son were delighted to have a bit of space at last, with even a small concrete yard at the back. At first there were only a few student houses in the street, but within a couple of years the families on either side of them moved out due to the rubbish and the noise — these houses were then snapped up by beady-eyed buy-to-let landlords who promptly set about turning three–bedroom family homes into six-bedroom student hovels, and the dastardly domino effect of scholar-squalor just kept on going.

By the time the unpleasantness took place, around a quarter of the unfortunate houses in the street played host to almost 100 students. There had already been a few weary years of the usual yahoo-ing in the early hours of the morning and repeated protests from the non-student residents that they had to get up for work in a few hours — but the Violets kept on shrieking, to the extent that families with young children were taking the extreme step of booking into hotels when big bashes were imminent. Then the male counterparts — the Gileses and Mileses — starting urinating over non-student cars and doorsteps, targeting those who had the temerity to complain. The message was clear — this is our territory now.

In the early hours of a weekday morning in December, my friend went into her backyard and shouted over the fence at her Shrieking Violet neighbours and their incontinent swains — celebrating a 21st birthday so noisily that items were literally falling from the shelves in her house — to keep the racket down. They chucked garden furniture, beer cans and bottles over the fence at her — and then the real nastiness began.

On their front doorstep, posh drunken students taunted my friend and her daughter with lovely bon mots such as ‘What are you qualified for — working at Morrisons?’ ‘What will you amount to, you lower-class slag?’ ‘This is a student street now — move out if you don’t like the noise!’

When a young father from a nearby house came out to remonstrate with them, a gang of the male students surrounded him, headbutted him and punched him in the face.

The one good thing to come from this vile incident was that due to the police involvement in the assault, Sussex University have warned the students in this particular street not to have any more parties, so my friend and her family are experiencing the wonder of unbroken sleep for the first time in years.

I know that the Shrieking Violets are not any more typical of students than Charlie Gilmour, who famously swung from the Cenotaph while off his chump on drugs, calling himself an anarchist while having recently swanked ‘I’ve always loved good-quality clothing. My parents said that if I got into Cambridge they would buy me a Savile Row suit.’

But it is ironic that the terrorising of ordinary people in their own homes — which should be the safest space of all — has come to fruition at the same time as cry-bullies on campuses across the land are acting like tinpot tyrants towards anyone who dares to dis-agree with them.

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For decades — even before it had its name, which sounds thrilling, as words with an X in them tend to — I’ve been a Brexiter. I even mistrusted the Common Market, as we called the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll before it showed us the deformed, power-crazed face of the EU’s Mr Hyde.

The adored MP of my childhood, Tony Benn, preached against it in any shape or form. ‘When I saw how the European Union was developing,’ he said, ‘it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don’t like it you can change it.’

I’m aware that being against the EU has always been about as popular in ‘civilised’ circles as being pro-capital punishment. (Which I also am.) Imagine my delight when, in recent months, two of the contemporaries I admire most — Suzanne Moore at the Guardian and Janice Turner at the Times — wrote magnificent columns in support of Brexit. And interestingly, they took robustly feminist views of the proceedings, which is handy, because of the third of Britons undecided on how to vote on 23 June, 60 per cent of them are women.

From Britain’s dubious induction into the wretched gang by that arch-misogynist Ted Heath to Neil Kinnock’s shameful monstering of the brave Brussels whistleblower Marta Andreasen, it’s hard not to see the EU as the biggest boy’s club of all. The recent letter by the ‘Women In’ group claimed that Europe has given us equal pay and anti-discrimination laws — but countries outside the Magic Circle have those too, while inside (Ireland closest to home) are only just dragging their attitudes to women into the 20th century. We Brexiters are fighting back by pointing out that £350 million a week is blown on the EU, which could be better spent on the priorities of women voters, such as healthcare.

Women are thought to be less Eurosceptic than men — but this doesn’t indicate open-mindedness, in my book, so much as fearfulness, which is surely not to be encouraged. What has quite rightly been called Project Fear plays on the Nervous Nellie in all people, evoking anxieties about more expense and less security, as though Britain had been some sad wraith of a nation in the pre-EU 1960s instead of the robust, confident country it so memorably was.

In fact, the behaviour of the pro-EU mob makes me think of the mode of manipulation known as gaslighting — ‘a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favour the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity’. Repeatedly, this small but dynamic country is told: ‘You’ll be nothing without me!’ ‘No one else will want you!’ and of course ‘You look fat in that dress.’ (See constant comparison of overweight, fun-loving Englishwomen to dull, thin French ones.)

It’s creepily similar to a bad marriage even before you bring in the German Question. Is Germany a homicidal maniac itching to start the third world war the minute we leave (those warnings that the EU has ‘kept the peace in Europe for 70 years’ — nothing to do with Nato, then?), or is it the cool-headed big brother that keeps unruly Britain in sensible shoes? It’s hard to see how it can be both.

The country is being ‘mansplained’ — another word popular with we feminists meaning ‘to explain something to someone, typically a man to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronising’ — on a massive scale when it comes to Brexit. But the mansplainers aren’t aware of how dumb they look, and how much their own desires distort their point of view.

There are lots of high-flown reasons to want to stay in the EU. But there are, I suspect, a sizable tranche of deeply uncool people who imagine that a bit of subtitled European cool might rub off on them. Emma Thompson’s recent rant about baked goods comes immediately to mind.

EU cheerleaders imagine themselves to be the repositories of French savoir faire, Italian passion and Scandi egalitarianism, but they are, ironically, generally a horribly recognisable English type — the metropolitan smuggie whose self-love is matched only by their loathing of their fellow citizens and the country that made them.

I see a stuck-in-the-mud, male-power institution that needs a good feminist kicking — and then I feel that even that would be a waste of our time, energy and pedicures. Let’s just leave them to get on with it, and go our own merry way. As every broad worth her weight in pinches of salt knows, the endgame with any gaslighter, bully or abusive spouse is not confrontation but non-engagement. Bring on the Brexit!

The post Feminists for Brexit appeared first on The Spectator.

‘Your old man’s barking!’ I remember hissing indignantly at my then best friend Toby Young way back in the 1980s after his father, Michael, had spent the evening patiently explaining his famous 1958 essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, over ‘supper’ at the somewhat grand family home in, of course, Islington. I’d obviously been thinking about something more pressing all those times we’d discussed the classic text in GCSE Sociology — probably about which order I’d ‘do’ Pan’s People in, should the opportunity arrive in suburban 1970s Bristol — but of course I’d presumed that ‘Lord’ Young (dead giveaway) would have favoured the rise of a meritocracy, being a man of humble origin himself.

Instead, I listened, dumb with horror (and focaccia), as he gently outlined the way in which a meritocracy would probably produce a cruel elite possessing none of the noblesse oblige of the nobs. Well, 30 years on, I still believe that what this country needs is a bit more meritocracy, not less; better a few more monsters of merit — preens — than the monstrous regiment of nepotistic nobs currently running the show. I wish I’d known that evening that the American rich give far more proportionally to charity than the English rich, because the Yanks are certainly more meritocratic but also appear to have a far greater propensity for altruism.

James Bloodworth is one of the best writers on politics around, and I was pleased to see that I turn up in a cameo — in typically combative mode — on page 50, putting the boot into SADs (the Sons and Daughters of the famous, who have effectively colonised the few jobs that working-class kids could historically escape through, from journalism to showbiz).

This book is a veritable roll call of rotters, and Tony Blair, as is his wont these days, comes out of it as the biggest wrong ’un around, crowing horribly, ‘I rather hope my sons do better than that!’ during a discussion about Harold Wilson’s children becoming teachers. So much for education, education, education. He also commissions a social mobility report which concludes, quite reasonably, that the only way bright poor kids can move up is for dull rich kids to move down, and that increasing inheritance tax would be a useful part of this desirable outcome: ‘As a result, the report was quietly dropped.’ You can see Cherie flicking through the vast family property portfolio, tongue lolling from her greedy maw, looking over Tone’s shoulder and warning him not to do anything to make life less cushy for the Blair brats.

Bloodworth is especially good on the way the diversity divas have diverted attention from the lack of opportunities for a whole swathe of underprivileged children put beyond the pale of pity by their risibly named ‘white privilege’. (While writing this, I read of a survey revealing that trainee teachers are being pressured into ditching their regional — i.e. working-class  — accents for the Queen’s English. As its author points out: ‘There is a respect and tolerance for diversity, yet accents do not seem to get this treatment — they are the last form of acceptable prejudice.’)

Bloodworth is such an elegant and passionate writer (not an easy combo) that the whiff of straw man which hangs around this book — he frowns on the idea of meritocracy while sighing over our obvious lack of one — does not annoy. But it’s a dismaying read, whichever way you slice it. Just imagine: someone born in the 1970s is less likely to be upwardly mobile than one born in the 1950s — like some awful parallel universe waiting for Doctor Who to come along and set things right.

‘In the UK, a person’s earnings are more likely to reflect their father’s than in any other country in the developed world.’ ‘Just three per cent of journalists have parents who work in unskilled occupations.’ I’ve never come across a book that made me want so much to pat myself on the back with one hand and pour a big sorrow-drowning drink with the other. But it has given me cause to remember my favourite motto — ‘He who dies rich dies shamed’ (Andrew Carnegie) — and continue to spread my modest wealth like a sailor on shore leave. The fleet’s in!

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As someone who managed to move from enfant terrible to grande dame without ever being a proper grown-up, I must say the menopause passed me by. I make a practise of having mostly much younger or male mates so I don’t have to hear old birds banging on about it, but occasionally my bezzie (who seems to have been undergoing the unfortunate process since the EU was the EC) will start feeling hot — then the next minute, she’s moaning about the British weather and pining to go somewhere warm. Women! My main thought as I pushed, tank-like, through mine was that as a broad who has lived her life in a bid to show that arch-bitch Mother Nature who’s the Daddy, defying her at every turn, I was damned if I was going to cry ‘Uncle!’ at the eleventh hour. But all those women who thought they’d be forever young — the same ones who thought their teenage idols were immortal, and who have formed an ever-mutating sob-leading squad in response — are going through it now, and so here come the books from the Media Menopause Mob.

You know those volumes you occasionally find which aren’t just books but precious things, that you just want to sit quietly somewhere holding, or even better take out and be seen with because they’re just so damn gorgeous as artefacts, let alone art? The Hot Topic is not that — it’s an UnBook, like a vampire is an UnDead rather than a living being. All we hacks have a moment or 12 when we’ve finished a sizeable piece of writing, had a good response and thought ‘Hmm, I bet I could make that into a BOOK!’ — well, don’t, or you could end up producing a monstrosity like D’Souza’s. Smeared with what we in the trade call screamers — pulled out pieces of text, hopefully sensationalist stuff that will get the idle newsstand peruser interested, which I’ve never seen in an actual book before — this is a magazine piece with ideas above its station in every way, including asterisks instead of proper swear words (she calls her son ‘a little s***’ — why not just call him a rotter?), sucking up to one’s sycophants by calling them ‘super-intelligent, super-switched-on, super-strong women out there’ (what, all of them? Not a weedy, needy ass-hat among them?), and having a hectoring tone which imagines it is pleasingly matey: ‘Listen…’ ‘Look…’ ‘Another thing…’ ‘Funny this…’ ‘And then there is the old sex thing…’ ‘My children are hugely sweaty, while my other half barely sweats at all…’ ‘Phew — so I’m not such a nutter…’ It’s like having a mad old lady come and sit next to you on the bus, albeit a bus going to South Kensington. In true magazine style, there’s a full-length photo of D’Souza on the back looking do-able — she’s obviously meant to be a Hot Menopauser, in the mode of the equally irritating Hot Feminist and Hot Widow books published recently. If men did this — Hot Doctor, Hot Hipster, Hot Grandad — we’d make vomit-faces, and quite rightly. The only people who should be allowed to tout themselves as hot are firemen.

If D’Souza’s book is a magazine piece in all but name, Marina Benjamin’s is not just a book — it’s a tome, an opus and a treatise. It’s equally up itself (literally, at times) but whereas D’Souza cackles with her coven in the kitchen, Benjamin is quiet-in-the-library, though easily as profoundly smug as D’Souza — the NW/SW mirror image of each other, media-ocrities under the skin. ‘We are a household of writers,’ she purrs at one point, and one’s mind wanders towards the likelihood and logistics of an entire family of scribblers being beaten to death with a giant Moleskine notebook. The Prologue alone had me sniggeringly reaching for my well-thumbed copy of Cold Comfort Farm to play spot-the-bucolic-cliché: ‘a communal garden that has got inside of me somehow’ — painful! — has trees ‘like giant sentinels’, a ‘tipsy profusion of greenery’, ‘blossom-laden, blowsy and heavy with perfume, swung drunken limbs’, ‘foliage puffing up and over like a risen souffle’ — what, no sukebind? My hostility to this piece of land was nailed when Benjamin gives it responsibility for her output: ‘Swallowed up by me. That spiky insubordination is inspirational — when I’m struggling with a piece of work, it spurs me into taking risks.’ If the end result is such overweeningly pompous prose, the day this scribe-egging scrubland is concreted over cannot come too soon for me.

Elsewhere we learn that her hubby is ‘trim and virile’ (TMI, as the kids say) while she is ‘all saggy pouches and nobby joints’ but of course there is much to humble-brag about — ‘a tight family, close friendships, my work as a writer and editor’. Somewhat sickeningly (and with a horrible disregard for language, coming from the head of a household of writers) hysterectomy scars are referred to as ‘war wounds’, the process of ageing as ‘time travel’, the menopause ‘like some fairground House of Horrors experience’. The lack of perspective and the level of humourless self-importance displayed is literally shocking. I know that I myself have always been a self-centred writer, but when I read bourgeois women’s accounts of their dreary little lives and losses as though they were of some earth-stilling import — the Guardian is always heaving with them, and they often become books — I become delighted all over again at my lightness of touch and my self-mockery.

By now I was feeling like a book-wormy Goldilocks — this one too shallow, this one too deep — so imagine my relief on getting to Miranda Sawyer, of whom I am such a fan that I recently rejected her offer to be her Pointless partner, so sure was I that not a thought worth having would come to my head in such close proximity. (I was basing this on fact, having once been interviewed by her live at Latitude and, as I recall, giving a very good imitation of a simpering simpleton throughout.) Her supple, sardonic style (panic is ‘that dark, revving provocateur’, death is ‘flickering and glittering somewhere to the side, around our blind spot where we can’t quite see it’) and the fresh admission of her frustration with the limitations of middle-age — ‘I wanted to arrive in a sunlit place, to be celebrated as a new magical queen, and to have the time to enjoy it’ — made me wish that words like ‘feisty’ hadn’t been ruined by a bunch of peevish shrews.

When I was a teenager, I swore I’d never be like my mum’s muckers, who moaned on about ‘The Change’ because they were bored and wanted attention, and I don’t see any reason to change my mind now, just because the moaners have book contracts. Talk about the over-examined life being not worth reading — how much truer is that of the over-examined innards. Writers, show me magic, show me passion, show me fun — as Sawyer manages to do, even on this dreariest of subjects — but please keep your insomniac ponderings to yourselves. Trust me, it’ll all look better in the morning.

The post Get over it! appeared first on The Spectator.

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