Diary

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Wednesday, 16th May 2007

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Gay weddings will be remembered as Tony Blair’s greatest achievement! Last week my wife, Santa, and I attended our first gay wedding and it was one of the best and most exhilarating since my own. Our friends Tom Konig Oppenheimer and Adam Beaumont Brown, fashion grandees listed among Britain’s most important gay potentates, gave a lasciviously glamorous dinner-dance at Tramp. It was such an improvement on English straight weddings. For a start, everyone was more beautiful, fit and fragrant. Glamourpusses prowled like pantheresses. The speeches were hilariously, outrageously, unzippingly saucy. The entertainment was the actress Thandie Newton singing ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’; the waiters were topless musclemen; Vogue photographed it. The camp exuberance liberated Anglo-straightness and converted even the most rhythmless clod-footed hokey-cokey conga-dancers into lithe prancing eroto-disco-fever Dionysians. If only all straight weddings could be somehow gay-ified.

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Frank Johnson’s beautiful memorial service was on Friday: how he’d have enjoyed the parade of grandees. In 1997, when he edited The Spectator, we cooked up a wonderful act of journalistic mischief: an interview with the Spice Girls in which they revealed they were Thatcherites. Recently Frank tended to telephone me pretending to be a (strangely Cockney) Soviet Marshal calling Stalin at Headquarters (Stavka). How I miss the East End’s urchin-Marshal calls: ‘Hey lad, Marshal Frank Zhukov calling Stavka! Permission to launch the offensive, mate!’

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