Craig Brown - The Lost Diaries

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 *

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

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

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

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

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.