SARAH SANDS
Zadie Smith has been compared to Martin Amis; it is true that both authors have pop-star status and cannot win prizes. White Teeth was the great British literary success of last year; so much so that Zadie has been bundled off to Sweden to write, far away from her rapacious fans. In the book-of-the-year round-ups, Martin Amis won the most votes, Zadie Smith the third most. Yet she could not win the Booker Prize, or the Orange Prize, or even the Whitbread Prize, which went to Matthew Kneale for his historical adventure focusing irresistibly on the harsh treatment of Aborigines. Kneale narrowly beat Lorna Sage for her memoir of a stifling postwar upbringing. At one point she even evokes the misery of 'a thick wet skipping-rope slapping the ground'. The lesson of these prizes is that gloom is good. Perhaps the shared fault of Amis and Smith is the confident, present-day quality of their writing, their sense of humour, however dark, and their lack of grievance. Some of Zadie's critics argue that she is a work in progress who should be judged another novel down the line. Others pre-emptively mention the authors who never produced decent second novels. Is there a plot to destabilise Britain's most talented young writer? There are more forthcoming prizes for Zadie not to win, starting with the WH Smith Award. Judges appear to have found an accommodation. Zadie is invited along to ensure glamour and attention but is then snubbed to show that writing should not be effortless or richly rewarded.
The crimes of Peter Mandelson have been judged with different degrees of censoriousness. but everyone seems agreed that his most repulsive trait is sucking up to the rich and powerful. On this matter I feel a twinge of sympathy. In the current Tatler I have been named alongside the distinguished, etc. MarieIla Frostrup and the steadfast, etc. Matthew Freud as a power flirt. I am particularly craven towards 'Tory grandees and media bigwigs'. Media bigwigs I take to mean Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Conde Nast. It is true that I tend to bow and scrape a bit in his company. I do not come across any Tory grandees. Tatler suggests that power flirting is a social pastime, but I, like Peter Mandelson, am grimly purposeful. Mandelson wanted money and I want articles. An Asian social analyst was quoted this weekend as saying that proximity to power rubbed off on you. What, then, must Peter Mandelson's banishment from power be like? Every day, on my journey to work. I pass Robert Bourne and Sally Greene's house on Chelsea Embankment which is almost entirely hidden by a high wall. But
each December the couple hold a party to celebrate Jesus's birthday rather than Peter Mande!son's. The gates fly open and one is led by torchlight into a vast, beautifully decorated hallway full of famous and beautiful people sipping champagne. The next morning, the light and laughter have gone, the gates clanged shut, normal rush-hour traffic resumed. It is as if it never happened.
My husband drives on our morning journey to work, because, as he often points out, he is a model of law-abiding motoring. He is forever checking in his wing mirror, allowing room for cyclists and slowing down at amber lights. 'Did it do them any good?' he will ask triumphantly, when we eventually catch up with other more impatient drivers. So it gave me enormous pleasure that it was my husband who received through the post one of those banged-to-rights pictures of our car, proving that he had gone through a changing light at Tower Bridge. These grainy pictures, which seem to belong more to a 1940s adultery blackmail case, are the latest step in the war between the police and the motorist. In this context, a power flirtee that I know replied to the police that it was undoubtedly his car in the photograph but he simply could not remember who was driving it. Whose licence should be docked, his or his wife's? The county police were so thrown by this question that they dropped the proceedings. I pass on the tip, knowing that t cannot work twice. In a small way, I have lived through my own version of the Rosie Boycott/Richard Desmond story. At about the same time that Desmond invaded the Express, a group of builders started work in my house. They claimed their stake in the property by pinning up a magazine picture of a glamour model on all fours. It was a cultural assault on my values in my home. 'It's not your house, it is our building site,' responded the foreman cheerfully. I took the Rosie course, conversing only through inanimate means — she chose email, I employed an architect. Recently, our local Olympia exhibition centre held a successful Festival of Erotica. The builders took a day off. The following day a Polaroid photograph had been pinned alongside the magazine portrait. The photograph was of my stunned-looking builder in a woolly hat standing next to the very same glamour model who appeared in the magazine. She had made an unexpected appearance at Olympia. I cannot look at this shot without being strangely touched. Pornography is not always about the debasement of women. In this case, it was the highest form of reverence.
0 ne problem with ideology is its necessary stereotyping. When men talk about women being biologically unsuited for the front line, which women do they mean? I think Zara Phillips could hold her own, but one would not want to see domestic goddesses in the thick of battle. The experiment is said to have failed in Israel but was a success in Bosnia. As a letterwriter in the Daily Telegraph pointed out, women themselves are divided, with army wives understandably opposed. Rational discussion will not be helped by the explosion of military dress on the catwalks. Any sense of women as comrades vanishes when you or your wife imagines that you will be sharing a tank with Jacquetta Wheeler. In the end, only women who look like tanks will be deemed safe to fight. Is this fair?
While waiters in London restaurants no longer have any inhibitions about handing women the bill, women have not wholly mastered the art of asking to sign it. I am aware of my own apologetic wince, which passes for a request. A male acquaintance tells me that his father's defining masculine ritual was calling for the bill. His father would put up his arm and then simulate writing out a cheque. The air squiggle is yet another lost tradition.
Sarah Sands is deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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