Diary

9 May 2009

My room was not ready when I arrived, underslept after a flight from Washington, at the hotel near Shaftesbury Avenue where I’m going to spend the next few days.

For many years, the ingenuity of the British press in exploiting the Brown-Blair rivalry story amazed me. What a gift the papers had for conveying that, this time, it was really about to blow. It was good to see last week that this old journalistic warhorse can still be saddled up, with the help of Hazel Blears’s remarks about the Prime Minister’s ‘lamentable’ failure to communicate. To an American audience, Blears’s insistence that she was 100 per cent behind the prime minister would have sounded wholly credible. For us, describing a politician as ‘failing to communicate’, or (in Americanese) ‘not getting his message out’ is what loyalists do. It’s a way of avoiding the alternative explanation, which is that the public hates him. Funny that the press does. Ninety per cent of them were drumming up Brown’s candidacy in the old days. Now, to someone who’s been away only a few months, their contempt is unfathomable, even irrational. On Monday, two daily newspaper cartoonists filled their frames with caricatures of the prime ministerial bum. Maybe this sort of personalisation of political opposition happens more in monarchies than republics.

I generally come to London with a food agenda — a checklist of eating pleasures that remind me of the times in the 1980s when I lived here. I like to have at least one lunch in a pub, get at least one meal that has a big helping of peas, eat whitebait if I can find it, and make at least one ‘meal’ of a pork pie bought in a supermarket. Today, the wolf is far enough from the door that I don’t pay much attention to what those pork pies cost. But how vividly I remember what they cost around 1984 or 1986 (39p), just as I remember the price of a pint of bitter (92p). Money mattered then, back in what I will now think of as my street-sweeping days.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times.