E very six months the tabloid press shakes its pudgy fist
in ecstatic indignation over some new film (usually French and about as offensive as a French actress’s unveiled breasts). Last week, it was a British film called Donkey Punch which prompted the ever-raging question ‘Is this the vilest film ever?’ The answer, as with all headlines ending in a question mark, is no, but it is quite possibly the worst. The title, for those of you who missed the disgusted though voluble explanations in the newspapers, is a term used to describe a mythical, sado-masochistic sexual act. The storyline? A group of guileless, cerebrally bankrupt girls from Leeds head to Majorca for a fun weekend — ecstasy, sex with strangers, the usual — when, as usual, the whole thing turns nasty. During the course of the donkey punch, the tarty, expendable blonde (they are a prolific species) dies. Never mind that the acting was as gruesome as the visuals — more troubling was the reaction of the (largely male) spectators. A pack of boys in front of me began to heckle encouragement as the scene unfolded, culminating in whoops of delight as the girl’s corpse lies prone on the bed. To laugh at grotesque films is natural, but this was something else: a chilling disassociation from reality of the kind that seems to be behind the epidemic of stabbings across Britain.
Dinner with the acute Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, who arrives tremulous with excitement. After 56 hours’ worth of interviews with Rupert Murdoch as part of a Random House biography to be published in December, the mogul’s wife, Wendy, had personally organised for Wolff to have an hourlong tête-à-tête with Tony Blair that morning. Colour for the book, I imagine, of the rosetinted variety. Michael was surprised to find himself impressed by our former PM. ‘He just looked so incredibly handsome,’ he drawled. ‘I couldn’t stop telling him so, then suddenly I realised it sounded like I was hitting on him. Oh and before you ask, of course I asked the question we’re all desperate to know: just where is this great flirtation with News Corps headed? And do you know what?’ Michael clapped his hands with amusement. ‘Blair blushed — the man actually blushed.’ Atext message from Naomi Campbell. ‘So sorry I was out of the country for your book launch. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.’ My literary head screams ‘no’; my publicity head: ‘Yes, if you could possibly batter a BA air hostess over the head with a copy of it, that would be fantastic. You are kind. xoxo’ Obamamania as the oddly square-looking political rock-star descends on London, with commentators melting and dinner parties a-gush across the country. A party at Toby Young’s new home (he’ll say Ealing, but it’s Acton) proves no different. Everyone swallows the Kennedy thing whole, no questions. Yet, like Bush, Obama seems to lack spontaneous interest in Europe. Maybe, like Donald Rumsfeld, he just thinks we’re old? Clinton at least made a point of doing a little study and sightseeing over here as a young man. But like the great mass of passport-free Americans Obama, a Columbia and Harvard Law man, has had no difficulty resisting our charms, only sparing the time for a quick flit to put flesh on the Kennedy cliché, for which we are (rightly) seen as suckers. When Kennedy did Berlin it was at the heart of the Cold War, a symbol of freedom surrounded by the enemy. Now it’s a place for orating in a void.
Five hours into Kelvin MacKenzie’s wedding on Friday, a slow, slurred murmur spread across the congregation: ‘Kelvin’s first dance. In the great room. Now.’ There followed a stampede. As the first bars of the Real Thing’s ‘You To Me Are Everything’ sounded, the former Sun editor grabbed his bride and began that strangest of things: the white man’s wedding dance. ‘It’s not something you can just do lightly,’ he panted afterwards. ‘There’s what I like to call the five-point plan. My right finger, which is arthritic, needs to be pointing upwards, stabbing the air. Then the left comes into play. Next the see-sawing movement of the hips begins — but this must be done gently. I got so competitive with my wife during the build-up to the wedding I hired a personal trainer and put my whole back out. A visit to a chiropractor ended up costing me £480 — pretty much double what all the training had set me back.’ And the final two points? ‘What I like to call the genuflecting technique: the raising and swinging of one knee, while maintaining balance with the other leg, and then the coup de grace: the 360-degree twist.’ Nobody, I’m assured, puts Kelvin in the corner.
Heat is a wonderfully democratic thing: even in the cosseted confines of the sponsor’s tent at Sunday’s Cartier International Polo, where the braying and playing usually eclipse any notion of watching the game, people began to wilt as temperatures hit 27°C. The trace of a drop on the forehead of the preternaturally cool burlesque star Dita von Tees heralded the oncoming deluge. There followed frenzied fanning, and small processions of women bent double, Quasimodo-style, to conceal large discolourations on their designer outfits. Remember that moment at Labour party conference when Tony Blair made the school-boy error of wearing a light blue shirt? That was a Sure ad compared to this. One man, surrounded by improbably good-looking women, seemed completely unaffected — what is it with Salman Rushdie?
Harm’s Way is published by Bloomsbury, £14.99. Celia Walden is senior feature writer for the Daily Telegraph.
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