BORIS JOHNSON
If you want proof that the world didn't change on II September, get down to the Manhattan coffee shop, the blue and orange chain dotted around London. For the past three years this place has been supplying me with my morning latte' in a pretty blue and orange cup with a special 'sipper' lid. And what silhouette appears in the little roundel of every cup? It is the Twin Towers, proud, tall, undestroyed. There are no plans, say the Bulgarian girls who run Manhattan, to change the logo. The image of the World Trade Center, tragic and defiant, will continue to symbolise Manhattan Coffee, along with the company's brilliant slogan 'Manhattan Coffee: A Way of Life'. That is just as it should be. To ink out the towers, or to buy in new paper cups, would be a kind of capitulation. It would be doing the work of Osama bin Laden, wouldn't it?
In an interview with The Spectator this week lain Duncan Smith reveals that he will not be joining the Carlton Club. I want to say now, in a spirit of fiefdom and fealty, how heartily I support this demarche. My own membership form will languish on my desk until such time as women are admitted. I will fight off the temptation to pay £1,000 a year. I will deprive myself of the joys of the Smoking Room. and the chance of meeting Bruce Anderson for a good old natter in the Library. All I will say is that I am not sure that all Tory women necessarily agree on this issue, or approve of the heroic stand we are taking. The last time I was making a speech in the Carlton Club, I was challenged by the glamorous blonde Baroness (Peta) Buscombe. Wasn't it monstrous that women weren't admitted? said Peta. Oh yes, I said, and began a general sucking-up to feminism, when suddenly I became aware of a barracking from other women present. They thought I was being wet, and they seemed especially peeved with Peta. 'When,' sang out one woman in the direction of the noble and learned lady, 'did you last make a pot of jam?'
Every time I go to Moscow, I am more stunned by the effects of capitalism. There are still some signs of the old brutalities, like the bushy blue-hatted traffic cops who forbid you to cross the road. But almost everywhere the forces of Western commerce are in rude and exuberant triumph. I first went as a 15-year-old, in 1980, when Brezhnev was in the Kremlin, and it is shocking to see all the sludgy thoroughfares now winking and flashing like Piccadilly. On every side there are whores and porn, Pepsi and Martini, and in shops that once
sold nothing but gherkins there are huge reverential effigies of French cheeses. Gone is the old GUM, the Gosudarstvenni Universalni Magazin, and in its place just a shopping arcade, pulsing with Russian techno-rock and singing Christmas trees. Even the ice-cream has lost its communist magic. It used to be a grey substance, in grainy grey cartons. It was utterly delicious. Now it is more convincingly vanilla, with proper edible cones, and full of EUapproved additives: and when you taste its awful new aftertaste, you suddenly wonder: what is the point of it all? Why do we love global capitalism, with its homogenising Moulinex? For an instant you sympathise with palaeo-conservatives like my friends Stuart Reid or Michael Gove, who want an end to free trade. And then you remember the words of a great Tory leader and Carlton Club non-member. Whatever the ills of globalisation, There Is No Alternative.
The last guinea pig has died. He lies stiff as a board, his little incisors bared in the final rictus. He was called 'Snake', in tribute to his surprising emergence as a male who successfully mated with his mother and his sister. It falls to me to bury him behind the shed, along with his immediate
family, in a furtive Fred West-style ceremony. It was joyful to watch the children's pleasure, as the guinea-pig population expanded from two to nine. It has been appalling to witness their grief, their choking, racking sobs, as one by one the little critturs have succumbed to some mystery Aids-like affliction. What do we take from this ghastly experiment in keeping pets? The children have at least been exposed, in the space of a year, to the full meaning of incest, infanticide, disease and death.
Many people have asked me to explain exactly what happened at that famous party at the house of Lord and Lady Black, which was given in my honour. What did the French ambassador say about the Middle East? Did he really mean to insult Israel? All I can say is that I have the perfect excuse for ignorance. At the time of the controversial exchanges, I had nipped off to vote at Westminster. As Enoch Powell once remarked, if you want to say something in the absolute confidence that it will not be reported, you should pronounce it in the Chamber of the House of Commons.
By the time you read this, our Christmas tree will be past its peak. In fact, the sharp little needles will have fallen off in such profusion that it will soon look like one of those 1980s German Green party posters warning of the dangers of acid rain on the Black Forest. That is because it is a traditional Christmas tree, just like the ones I used to know. It is a Norway spruce. It is far nicer, in every way, than the nondrop varieties, which are called Nordman fir or Fraser fir and which are everywhere. I looked in three Christmas tree shops before I could find a spruce. 'What's happened?' I asked the man. 'It's the women, innit, guy,' he said, hawking and thumping his hands together for warmth. 'They don't want to clean up them needles no more.' Is he right? Or is that the kind of reactionary nonsense that is keeping the Carlton Club in the Stone Age?
One thing that has not changed in Russia is the state attitude to children born with disabilities. Down's syndrome children are either left to die or incarcerated in miserable state homes. Downside Up is a British-inspired charity which teaches Russian parents how to look after Down's syndrome children. I saw what they do in Moscow. It is marvellous, and worth supporting.
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