High life
Libellers
Tala
The gutter press is after me once again. The first libel came in the Grovel column of Private Eye. In that infamous page I was described as a child molester, a drug-crazed social climber, and many other things. People who know me have been begging me to issue a writ, but I prefer not to. As everyone knows, no foreign toxic substance has ever entered my body except for aspirin, and as far as child molesting is concerned, the opposite is true. I love older women, preferring Miss Havishamto Brook Shields any day. Experience is more important than youth and looks, and although Miss Havisham could not be exactly described as a polished lover, she did look very experienced in the film. If we do end up in court it will be Lord Gnome who has sued me, because I plan to visit Greek Street soon (accompanied by my faithful baseball bat) and then we'll see who is drug-crazed. He will need drugs for the next few months to get over the pain.
But the real libel came from my friend Vere Rothermere's rag, in the Femail section of that sordid tabloid. It all began when a low-life publishenrang the Daily Mail and persuaded the editor to commission a story about an unreadable book which is bought only by the benevolent owner of the Spectator and no one else. It is High Life/ Low Life, and too much has already been written about that awful opus. Once I had made the mistake of accepting an interview with a woman writer, the damage had been done. I should have known better when the woman writer asked me if she could have me photographed while I was attending the opera. She sat down and asked some pretty stupid questions, and, well, I gave some pretty stupid answers.
It was Casanova who said, 'Non erulesco evangelium'. The little woman writer did not like that. So she describes me, libels me rather, as a gossip. To call this distinguished column gossip is a gross perversion of language. Typically, she begins by writing the most horrible lie of all, that my father actually subsidises me. And she managed to miss the best point I made about politics: she actually wrote that I said the Russians were coming. What I said in fact was that Carthage was a state that bred smarter people than the Romans. The Carthaginians were better merchants, better cavalrymen, better warriors. Definitely smarter than the Romans, but they were softer. They never thought of total war with Rome because they would have risked. losing a trading partner. So the Romans, who were just like the Russians have always been — slow, disciplined, expansionist and totally ruthless — finally did away with them even their language only lasted another 400 years. I used the same parallel with the West and the Soviets. We are smarter, live better, could even win a war if we really wanted to. But in the end we will lose because we are more concerned with consumer goods than ideas and ideals.
The little woman dismissed all these higher thoughts with one sentence: 'The Russians are on their way.' Given the fact that I have had woman trouble before (writing about women that is) I should not be surprised. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman who is smart enough to know that she hath the makings of a remarkable ugliness.' Which this lady did. After the interview she told me that she was a left-winger, and lived with one too.I was not surprised: people who have not been blessed by nature tend to blame things like free enterprise for their bad luck.
She finished her article by describing me as depressed. It was the only thing she got right. Having been to see Mozart's finest opera the night before, having dined with the beautiful wife of a friend of mine, having had a marvellous meal at Annabel's and having been woken up for an interview by a not so attractive, female left-wing journalist, I would be a pretty insensitive fellow if I didn't feel depressed.
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