DIARY
JULIE BURCHILL
Three things are interesting about l'affaire Bottomley. One, that the Sun refused to print the story about the illegiti- macy of the Health Minister's first-born while the Independent lapped it up; with the new timid tabloids minding their Ps and Qs, Will the broadsheets replace them as home of the shock-horror? Two, that while this does not make Mrs Bottomley any less of a person, it shows her to be considerably less of an operator than she once seemed; what a brilliant stroke of PR it would have been to announce, at the same time as setting those horribly prim government targets to reduce teenage illegitimate pregnancies, that, yes, she Virginia Bottomley knew how hard it was to live up to such high ideals — she had been a single mother herself! Her popularity rating would have left the rest of the Cabinet behind — as it is, she is left looking like just another hypocritical politi- cian. And three, is it not odd that the child was christened Peter, and that this was later changed to Joshua? Unlike the Americans, English people of Mrs Bottomley's class tend not to call their boy children after the father — it causes too much confusion — unless, that is, the man is unlikely to stick around. Can it be that the young Virginia for one brief moment wondered if the older Peter — having put her in an interesting condition — might abandon her in a man- ner more worthy of his disgusting name- sake Sir Horatio? Surely not.
Unlike The Spectator's etiquette agony aunt, Mary Killen, I don't know who should go through a revolving door first — I went to a comprehensive school. But over the Years, I have noticed something interesting about couples and revolving doors. When People are newly in love, they can never resist the temptation to jump into one sec- tion together, even under the stern eye of the most disapproving of doormen. You look quite like auditionees for the zany old Sixties television show The Monkees, but it's a wonderful feeling. In later years, howev- er, when the bloom has gone off the Brie, the components of a couple tend to keep to their own compartments, separate as two sexless astronauts in their sterile pods. Some people cite the cessation of flower- giving as the cooling-off point in a romance, and some the keeping of differ- ent bedtimes. But I'll put my money on the Spinning door every time.
Explaining her role in the film Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer says that dressing Up in skin-tight vinyl and six-inch heels was Part of Catwoman's 'empowerment as a Woman' (as opposed to a cat, I suppose). While Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David, has spoken of her forthcoming film Boxing Helena (in which a man cuts the limbs off a beautiful young woman and keeps her in a box) as a parable about 'the strength of women'. And recently on Woman's Hour I heard a feminist academic claim that when a woman forces herself into a corset, she is making a statement about female autono- my. All this, of course, is Politically Cor- rect-speak. But these examples should give comfort rather than offence to those stout Englishmen who believe that the PC move- ment is the worst thing since sliced bread. These statements merely show how easily all philosophical dance crazes — from Hip- pie to hip-hop — are assimilated into the real American ideology of turning a buck. Rest assured, gentlemen: sex, violence and women will continue to be exploited by the American media to your heart's content — only the rationale will have changed.
Taditionally, people who believed in God were thought to be sexually repressed, plain and painfully old-fashioned; atheists, on the other hand, were sexy and daring. But somewhere over the past ten years this perception has reversed itself. All the rep- resentatives of atheism one sees are besan- dalled old wrinklies of either sex, usually with beards, quite interchangeable with the Fabian or Flat Earth societies. Christians, on the other hand, used to look like Thora Hird and Cliff Richard — now they look like Madonna and Prince and Andre Agassi and Amanda de Cadanet. Add to this Mimi Rogers in The Rapture and the beautiful young ex-drug fiend lounge singer turned preacher, Marianne Williamson, in Los Angeles (the woman who converted Kim Basinger) and you have to conclude that the Faithful have never looked better. The death blow of atheism, on the other hand, has been dealt from two directions: the use of the horrendous Claire Rayner to front the videotapes of the National Humanist Organisation currently doing the rounds in schools, and the monumentally unhip and ugly public school pop group Genesis choosing to release a video mocking 'over- the-top' American fundamentalist preach- ers. The Devil may still have the best tunes, but God now has the best groupies.
This week the beautiful Lady Helen Windsor marries the handsome Mr Tim Taylor. They are about the same age, and they met through their work in the strange world of Art. They seem to have everything in common, including a taste for Nintendo. But he is from Guildford — gorblimey, guv'nor! — and she is from St James's, and by the way the papers are behaving this is the most zany, wacky, way-out pairing since John and Yoko. One believes that society really is becoming classless, until one reads newspaper reports which make out a boy from the stockbroker belt, inhabitant of a four-hundred-year-old house, scion of a small public school, to be some sort of tough Lawrentian lout from the wrong side of the tracks. When polite Surrey is seen as a land of the exotic 'Other' I really do feel like a stranger in a strange land.
In a shocking new survey of the sexual fantasies of Englishmen, I read that while 17 per cent fantasise about film stars, 20 per cent about perfect strangers and 4 per cent about relations, a whopping 36 per cent of them fantasise about their best friend. I hope this proves that an English- man's best friend is not his dog.
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