DIARY
Iget a letter from Debrett's, asking me if I want to be in their book People Of Today. When I boast about it to my best friend, who's in the proper one, (People Of Yester- day, presumably) he laughs rudely and says it's dead common. And they won't even put you in unless you order a copy! Actually this is not true, but I don't think I want to be in it anyway; I wouldn't go to the same party as Paul Gambaccini, so why should I want to be in the same book as him? Any- way, the questions the POT people ask are not only insolent but potentially fatal. Obviously I'm not going to give out my address to all and sundry! — I am an inter- national love object, and an obvious target for some unhinged worshipper. And I can't fill in any of the other sections because I don't have any qualifications or awards and I don't belong to any professional body or society or club. Unsheathing my secret weapon, I search for the question about how much money I earn. But there isn't one. It strikes me in passing that it may be indicative of the shallowness of my life and my lack of real values that whenever I find questionnaires in magazines, I turn straight to the income section, fill it in and then throw the whole thing away. I am what I earn. But how on earth can you tell if someone actually is a Person Of Today unless you know how much they fetch on the open market?
he newspapers are gleefully spotting the ball sitting smugly in Miss Glenda Jack- son's own goal, after the prospective Labour candidate for Hampstead made a speech at the party conference last week promising to remove the charitable status of private schools. This, apparently, would cause many of them to close down. Though how institutions dedicated to excellence and competition ever came to get 'charita- ble' status in the first place is an absolute Mystery to me. Is this perhaps the Ameri- can school of thought which decrees that gifted' children are heir to as many prob- lems as stupid ones? Anyway back to Miss Jackson, who being a simple woman of good robust working-class blood has obvi- ously meekly accepted the received wisdom on Hampstead; that it is a 'liberal' place. Actually, this could not be further from the truth; with the break-up of the communist dictatorships it remains one of only a hand- ful of true tyrannical fiefdoms. Liberal on allowing the building of eating-houses for the working-class? No. Liberal on letting gypsies camp on Hampstead Heath? Yuk! Liberal about education? Well, only if you understand 'liberal' in the Tory sense of let- ting every man grab what he can. Come to think of it, this is probably what has been meant by 'liberal Hampstead' all these
JULIE BURCHILL
years. No doubt Miss Jackson will now have to pay for her bluntness and surrender her prospective seat to someone with a much greater grasp of duplicity. I would feel sorry for her — but she and her kind have made it quite difficult. In the 1980s, it was the bog-standard left-wing response to any debate on the policies on President Rea- gan, no matter how serious, to round off with the sniggering reminder that he had once been (and never mind that he had been a politican for twice as long) 'an actor'. I believe this fatuous little put-down was originated by Gore Vidal, but it spread like wildfire as the last word on the suitabil- ity for office of a practising thespian. There was only one problem. Soon — inspired, no doubt, by the success of Mr Reagan himself — every left-wing scenery-eater under the sun started issuing lofty pronouncements on matters political. Miss Jackson's endorsement was their triumph. But how long can it be before the Right start smirk- ing when Glenda, or Janet Suzman, or Emma Thompson, or Sean Connery start mouthing off about the state of the planet? They are, after all, only actors.
Caring, sharing, nurturing Nineties or not, money is still considered far sexier than sex itself. Thus the main question being asked about Sir Allan Green's Achilles ache this week was not 'What little speciality, exactly, was he in search of?' but 'Why on earth did he settle for a £20 King's Cross doxie when he could have had some scrummy piece set up in a mews flat in 'I'm a serious money spider.' Mayfair?' It is taken for granted that Sir Allan could have afforded far better than young Nicola, who is obviously a strict fol- lower of the Mandy Smith Diet. But just look at his commitments! Two grown chil- dren; the boy went to Eton, and the girl probably cost him a fortune in horsemeat. A house costing £800,000 and a villa in Menorca. A wife who didn't work and was renowned for her dress sense and decorat- ing skills and who drove a car with the per- tinent registration plate EVA 250. All this and at 56 years of age, the wretched man was trying to get by on £82,000 a year! I couldn't get by on 82K a year, and I don't have half his overheads. Personally, I think the mystery is not why he chose a £20 tottie over an expensive mistress, but the fact that he could afford to pay anything at all.
There are many things to disapprove of when considering the desire of the Brussels Blob to re-create the diverse nations of Western Europe as one big bland blah. There's its xenophobia (us, whitey, against the rest of the big bad world!), its treachery (selling our souls for a handful of deutschmarks) and its retrogression (at a time when Eastern Europe is breaking out of federalism and into sovereignty.) But on a less crucial level, there are those little details of taste and aesthetics. We all know that prolonged contact with Europe means that, one morning, we Britons will wake up and never be able to make a great pop record again! But at least solid old feet and inches will always have their glamour, a fact which struck me this week when idly listen- ing to the lewd chatter of my somewhat sluttish single girlfriends. Can we ever, ever imagine the day when a girl will silence the competition by boasting that her boytoy is 'packing 255 millimetres'?
Miss Fiona Fullerton, 34, says she has found love at last, after a run of bad luck with bounders. And 'What is so refreshing about Michael is that he has seen the real me beneath the gloss.' My blood, which had been warming up nicely up to this point, ran cold. Because letting an adored one see the real you beneath the gloss is fatal to any relationship. When I think of being in love, it's precisely the moment I've seen the real them beneath the gloss that they've started to look . . . well, short. (One of the first signs that you're falling out of love with a person is that they start looking less tall than they used to.) I am sure that if anyone ever saw the real me beneath the gloss, they would be similarly repelled. So I urge Miss Fullerton to slap on a second coat of gloss and keep the real her well under wraps, if she wants this liaison to last.
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