I n the month of back to basics, I no longer
hanker for parties or cut-price cashmere, just the long, deep bath of my dreams. We spent New Year with friends in Cameron country: lovely Oxfordshire farmhouses, big fires and buttockhoning walks. My husband emerged glowing from his bath and said very sweetly that he would run me a fresh one. Nooooo! Any fule kno you never get more than one tankful at a time in a country house, however well appointed. But he is a city boy so I said, ‘Thank you, darling,’ raced for the plug and sat in the remaining five inches, covered in gooseflesh from the navel upwards. Now I leaf through boiler brochures in a manner which verges on the pornographic.
Back in London and bumping into an old neighbour who has moved to a grander place, I ask how it compares with her old house. ‘Heating doesn’t work,’ she says. ‘It’s just one of those houses where it never does.’ As her husband is a successful investment banker and they are famously good at interiors, this is puzzling. I grope for a polite way of saying, ‘Oh but you’re so well off you could surely have the whole system turned hydrotastic?’ She catches my drift straight away. ‘Still wouldn’t work,’ she says. There is something very British about this.
My other winter vice is watching reruns of the BBC’s Grumpy Old Women. It taps into that moment before you are officially middle-aged but suddenly start thinking, ‘That plastic twine is so horrible, Must save bits of proper string.’ Early grumpy list for 2008: people who use the phrase: ‘Your old friend X’ when they are really trying to score a cheap point. People who say ‘Not a problem’ when asked to do something. Recordings saying, ‘Your call is important to us’ (just not so much that we would get the staff to answer it). People who tell you, ‘You should get out more.’ (Because?) And anyone who says ‘You’re a star!’, an apparent compliment but with the undertone of addressing a slightly simple housemaid. Oh I could go on. And on. And on.
The Standard will be running the first of its mayoral debates next week in which Boris Johnson faces his public. As chair I am scrupulously neutral for the night: the Switzerland of London politics. But I do wonder whether our candidates aren’t too well-behaved. My own favourite mayor is the Berlin incumbent the sunbed-tanned Klaus Wowereit, known as ‘Wowi’ and not for nothing. Wowi set his mark on the city hall by hosting a sexual fetishism conference. He has a pierced nipple (left, since you ask) and enjoys a night out with his gay partner dancing in the later of Berlin’s late clubs. Faced with dwindling budgets, he declared that the German capital’s motto should be: ‘Poor but sexy’. One thing I do miss from our lot is any obvious sense of fun about the job. For all its problems and rows, London is where you can be grown up and still enjoy yourself, so let the candidates give us their manifesto for good times, as well as the sober stuff. Thrift being a January thing, I vow to avoid overpriced taxis (you hear me on that Ken?) and Oyster card my way to Westminster on the Circle Line. It’s the Russian roulette of travel: could take 12 minutes: could take half the day. But as my appointment time with the Minister for Drains ticks by, the surreal announcements on the state of the network occupy the mind: ‘There are severe delays on the Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith and City and the District Line — and some delays on the Piccadilly Line due to a passengerrelated incident. All other services are running normally.’ In other words, if you want to get from Hainault to Epping Forest, lucky you.
As Peter Hain faces the consequences of another funding scandal (unlike Tube trains, there’s bound to be one along again soon), I am worried about how his mum is taking it. The Member for Neath and I once shared a platform in a debate on Afghanistan. Afterwards a small throng gathered round to agree or berate us accordingly. A fierce woman headed straight for Peter, congratulated him warmly, but pointedly ignored me standing alongside him. ‘That’s my mum,’ he explained as she swept off. ‘She remembers you interviewed me for The Spectator when I said we had the worst trains in Europe — and she’s never forgiven you for getting me into trouble.’ I fear Peter is in a bit more this time. Perhaps Hain mère could call another of the other fretful front-bench mothers for comfort. The Cabinet was recently enjoined to come clean about any youthful cannabis encounters in a collective mea culpa. One rising-star minister joined the confessional, assured by No. 10 that no reprisals would follow. Well not from Gordon anyway. The next day he found an abrupt text on his mobile: ‘Please call mum. Very upset.’ The tortured reinventions of Gordon continue to fascinate. Since the New Year, he has acquired an interview tick of prefacing answers, ‘If I may say so’ — of course you may, you’re the bloody Prime Minister — and adding that he is happy to have ‘a debate’ on this or that. That goes straight on my banned phrase list, since if we want to have a debate we will, thanks, whether Mr B likes it or not. A colleague coined a great description of those who suddenly acquire a thin layer of civility as they move up the corporate tree, ‘He’s been to Nice School,’ he would say as some Shrek in a suit attempted the transition. Gordon has just graduated from Nice School — but not yet summa cum laude.
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