DIARY

JILLY COOPER Someone should produce a television series entitled Women Behaving Beautifully, kicking off with Lady Annabel Goldsmith. Funny, glamorous, protective, warm-heart- ed, whether campaigning for her late hus- band's Referendum Party, comforting waifs like Diana, Princess of Wales, or rejoicing in her pack of ravishing children and grandchil- dren, she is one of the nicest women I have ever met.

Her annual July party resembles that 15th-century tapestry in the Musee de Cluny in Paris, in which traditional foes like the greyhound and the hare lie happily together, while foxes frisk with rabbits and stoats. On arrival I see Norman Lamont, Paul Johnson, Taki, Claus Von Bulow and Tara Palmer- Tomkinson talking merrily.

Have always loved Tara for her beauty, exuberance and kindness to older people. Pleased to see her looking so well.

Also believe her totally, when she insists that the Prince of Wales is far too kind to ban her from any royal jaunt. It is she who has decided to stay away in order not to embarrass the royal family. The press, she sighs wearily, will report otherwise. Sure enough by Saturday the tabloids are leading on how the Prince is banning her, adding that such intransigence will exacerbate her `cocaine habit', and accusing her parents of disloyalty for joining the Prince on his cruise. With pressures like that, Tara reminds me heartrendingly of the puppy in the Andrex ads lolloping into a vivisection clinic.

ack in the thick of Annabel's party, see charming, familiar smiling face and ask how it is. Only when smiling face replies it is absolutely fine and how am I, realise in embarrassment that I am addressing Princess Alexandra. Bobbing on one leg is like balancing on a pogo stick. The Princess is talking to a dashing young American with iron-grey hair and a tie covered in prowling Panthers, who says he used to work for Sir James Goldsmith. We chat animatedly.

Only when I expose theory that Clinton deliberately started the war in Kosovo to de- stabilise the euro, do his green eyes flicker. By this time Princess Alexandra's place has been taken by Andrew Sinclair., Keen to introduce my new friend, I ask him what he's doing in England anyway, whereupon a grin- ning Sinclair whispers in my ear that I've been lecturing the American Ambassador. Spend the rest of the evening, beseeching large handsome men to pretend to be oak trees, so they can shield me from Princess Michael, with whom I fell out over a piece I wrote about her in the Eighties. Long to make it up, but nervous she'll still be cross, I bottle out.

As Sonia and Andrew Sinclair give me a lift home, we discuss our affection for

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Jonathan Aitken who, when I had my row with Princess Michael, was the first person to write and commiserate. Nor can there be much wrong with a man who has fathered such glorious and fiercely loyal children.

How inadvertently does one bring luck to other people. Back in 1980, my friend Tom Hartman and I compiled an anthology of women's quotes. In the chapter devoted to religion I evidently slagged off Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Sci- ence, for allowing appendixes to rupture and tumours to riot untreated.

Today Tom rings in ecstasy. He has been banned from a ruby-wedding lunch he was dreading, because his hostess, a fervent Christian Scientist, has stumbled on our anthology, and refuses to allow anyone `linked' to that dreadful Cooper woman 'to cross her threshold'. (Of pain presumably.) Have worried myself sick over the issue of fox-hunting. Many of my dearest friends and several of my fictional heroes are devot- ed to the sport. I also love watching horses and hounds hurtle across the country, but cannot deny the appalling cruelty of ripping foxes apart or the perfidy of earth-stopping and digging out with terriers.

Hearing ringing voices and the booted stamp of ramblers murdering our rural peace last Sunday, I find the perfect solu- tion. If New Labour is so committed to the Right to Roam, why doesn't it give access to all those open spaces, commandeered from :lust the one?' landowners, over to the hunts, who can then chase ramblers instead of foxes. With an all- pervading scent of goaty armpits and those straggly ginger beards to worry, hounds would hardly know the difference.

So enjoyed writing about music in my last three books, it is hard to get stuck into the art world for my next one. This is particular- ly the case when a favourite soprano rings up to report she recently visited the sublime Jose Cura in his dressing room.

Jose, who has a reputation for being a diva's man, promptly gathered her into a bear hug. Playfully wrapping her legs round his waist my friend encountered a huge bulge. Alarmed that seduction was immi- nent, she was vastly relieved to identify the bulge as his money pouch. Many top singers refuse to emerge from their dressing rooms until they have been paid in full in cash.

Suspect the art world may prove equally venal, when a painter friend gleefully informs me he is being paid between £60,000 and £80,000 for a portrait of an Anglican bishop. When I start fulminating over the squandering of little old ladies' col- lection money, he tells me shirtily this is the going rate for any decent portrait painter.

Meanwhile I am intrigued of news that Sir Edward Heath grew so fed up with having his portrait painted on television recently that he stalked out in the middle saying he was off to London. Also learn that painters' wives are the worst backseat drivers because their husbands are constantly seeing ideal subjects framed in driving mirrors and run- ning into stone walls or cars in front.

Shopping in Stroud, I am so enraged my ancient 50p keeps failing to produce a car- park ticket, that I decide to risk getting clamped. Outside Boots, I am accosted by an old man jangling a tin. Give him ancient 50p, whereupon he clamps sticker and four octo- pus fingers on to my left boob. Leaping away, I learn he is collecting for British Diabetic Research — a non-sugar daddy perhaps.

If boob-clamping discriminates against women, consider the plight of my poor dear husband. Twice in recent years he has been asked to vote yes or no to members of the Garrick accepting women. Twice also he has been beseeched by the MCC to vote in favour of the election of lady members. Now he has received a letter from his TA regi- ment, the Honourable Artillery Company, seeking his views on the admission of ladies to this august body of part-time officers.

As my husband has long been irresistible to the opposite sex is there more to this than meets the eye? Will the virago gangs pur- sue him next into the Gents at Paddington Station? Please look after this bear.