T here are many things I’ll miss about my year with
David Cameron, not least my regular visits to Portcullis House, the ugly upside-down cow’s udder opposite the Commons (it was designed by Michael Hopkins, although it looks as though he did this in the dark, possibly using Plasticine and some peat briquettes). After a while I began to think of its lobby as a current affairs version of the bar in Star Wars, the one peopled by a galaxy of freaks. It is also something of a research assistant catwalk, and while you couldn’t reasonably compare it to the lobby of Vogue House — which, predictably, has the most glamorous front of house in London — there are enough Tamzins, Tabithas and Tamaras here to put a spring in your John Lobbs. You never get the hordes of tourists you see at the Reichstag, but they wouldn’t be disappointed if they pitched up here instead of across the road. After a couple of months it started to feel like one of those places where, if you stood there long enough, you’d bump into everyone you’d ever met, everyone you’d ever read about. You’d see Frederick Forsyth scuttling about, or Charles Clarke looking as though he was running from something large and forbidding. Steve Hilton would be rushing around barefoot in his black T-shirt and baggy shorts, and often looked so underdressed I thought he must be testing the parameters of decorum, seeing if he could get thrown out or not. His office had hinted that since moving to California he might have started wearing chalkstripe suits, but when he turned up at the book launch on Monday — flanked by Cameron, George Osborne, Andy Coulson and Ed Llewellyn — the black T-shirt was reassuringly intact.
We’ve just come back from staying at the Rajasthan hotel that is repeatedly called the best in the world, the Oberoi Udaivilas in Udaipur. The service here is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before, and the staff appear to know what you’re doing before you do it yourself. They kindly laid on a cooking class for our kids one morning, and when I went in to the kitchen to pick them up before lunch, I noticed a photocopied sheet on the pinboard, with a photograph of yours truly, with some biographical information and a rather worrying encapsulation of my dietary needs: after a blushingly nice paragraph about my so-called achievements it said, bold as brass, ‘Likes to drink Kingfisher beer.’ I mean, I ask you — they could have at least said I never drink one before 11.59 in the morning.
Ihave to go to New York this week, and the thing that’s surprised me most about the city recently has been the pronounced animosity towards Russian tourists by upmarket hoteliers. ‘Sorry about the noise,’ said one to me in a hotel bar there three weeks ago. ‘They’re Russian.’ On a recent trip to Milan, I lost count of the number of luxury goods manufacturers who told me that Russians are now their number one customers worldwide. The thing is, nobody wants them in their hotels. They might order the most expensive champagne, they might pay rack rate, and they might order expensive food just to see what it looks like, but — according to the hotel industry, and I’ve spoken with people who look after hotels in Europe, North America and Asia — they’re rude to the help, raise their voices at the breakfast buffet and allow their womenfolk to go topless at the pool. Yes, you can buy our man-bags, we say, but no we don’t want you on our floor.
We’re in the final stages of doing up our house in Wales (the land of my father — he was a farmer, like his father before him), and I like to say that I’ve bought the most expensive mud in the country. When we first started looking for somewhere to buy, I got the impression that — regardless of what the weather was like in England — as soon as we crossed the bridge, for some reason it started raining. But I now understand I’m wrong, and have now realised that it actually starts raining as soon as the Volvo enters the drive. I’m certain that if I study the deeds carefully, I’ll see that I’ve actually bought a house with its very own cloud.
Last week we held our annual GQ Men of the Year Awards, an extravaganza of excess — excess crinoline, excess champagne and excess celebrity. This year we had the peroxide thesaurus Boris Johnson too, Politician of the Year, and an excess of applause. The last time Bozza came to the awards he presented the Politician of the Year award to Michael Howard, and was resoundingly booed offstage (although not as resoundingly booed as Howard himself), however this time he appeared almost as a conquering hero, and nearly got as much attention as Tony Bennett, Led Zeppelin and Christine Ohuruogo. As he stepped down from the podium and entered the press pit, he was besieged by photographers, gossip columnists and broadcast media. Asked by one journalist if he was at all surprised to win the award he said, blinking like the Three Stooges’ Moe Howard as played by Hugh Grant, ‘Well, it was certainly a surprise to beat Alistair Darling.’
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