Something Sensational to Read on the Train | Gyles Brandreth

He merits the backhanded compliment of ‘impossible to dislike’. But he does not merit the forehanded insult ‘smug’, the traditional epithet the idle and morose apply to the happy and successful. He is happy, and he is successful. He earned the latter. The former seems to be temperamental.

Thus, annoyingly, he lacks many of the qualities you look for in a diarist. He is minimally bitchy, apparently almost impossible to embitter, shows a discretion that the reader applauds but does not rejoice in, and doesn’t shag about. A promising youthful polyamorousness gives way very soon to an apparently blissful marriage. He has eyes only for his wife Michele, or ‘M’ — and not even the charms of Joanna Lumley (glimpsed in her pants) or Mary Kenny (braless in a see-through top) are enough to draw them astray.

If he has a dark side, it’s seldom in evidence here. He admits to not liking parties as much as his public persona suggests, to insomnia, and to having ‘very little feeling for anyone beyond M and the children’. Suggestively, he writes in a parenthesis: ‘I can’t relax. I don’t relax. I get through life by working.’ But mostly — at least for the purposes of these amusing diaries — he’s lost in vaudeville.

There’s a sort of running joke of Prince Philip — with whom Brandreth first comes in contact through his work at the National Playing Fields Association — thinking he’s a nincompoop. Introduced at a reception to ‘the President of Pakistan’, Brandreth is hopelessly tongue-tied. Prince Philip returns, and intuits what’s going on: ‘He’s the president of the Pakistan Playing Fields Association you idiot. He is not General Zia. Does he look like General Zia? Good God, man, do you know anything?’ When Brandreth boasts on another occasion of having had breakfast with ‘Blake Carrington from Dynasty’, the Duke responds: ‘I haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about. I had breakfast with the Queen.’ Finally, Prince Philip is visiting Chester with his wife in the early 1990s, and comes upon Brandreth among the dignitaries lined up to receive them.

‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m the Member of Parliament.’
‘Good God, are you really?’