I was starstuck by David Cameron
In the week of the Spectator Summer Party, Steven Berkoff recalls another of our celebrations at which he sought out the Tory leader and forgave his confusion of Brando and Dean
It was a large thickish card. ‘180th anniversary of the Spectator’, to be celebrated at the Churchill Hotel in elegant Portman Square. It looked to be an event not to miss and I’m quite partial to a little schmoozing from the ‘Right’ since it is from within my domain on the Left that I have been the most scourged. This has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but I conclude that the Left is not quite so left as it would like to pretend it is.
The traffic was horrendous, and like the maze of Theseus, each turn I took sadistically led me back via one-way streets to my start position. Thus have London streets been turned into a lunatic’s worst nightmare. Get it sorted Boris!
At last Portman Square. I am guided in with beaming smiles and my black Beetle is even valet parked. I walk in and pose obligingly for the archive photographers. I then walk into a gigantic room, which is the inner sanctum, the hive of The Establishment.
Facing me is an incredible mêlée of people chattering furiously, gripping flutes of champagne. I sidle over to the side of the room and idly survey a tempting banquet of snacks and just at that moment a very pleasant old acquaintance approaches and pours unguents into my ear, with praises of a modest play of mine. We recall those heady days when I put on a play in the West End each year. From nowhere an attractive young woman joins us whom he introduces as an underground journalist. She apparently insinuates herself into risky situations posing as an interested party. She ‘shyly’ confesses that she knows hardly anyone in the room. This is in itself a challenge to a male not only to redeem the situation but to introduce her to everybody and anybody in that august collection. So now that I have a cause, my ego is calibrated up a few notches and we plough through the room searching out, through the yakking Tory flesh, the celebrated and illustrious.
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David Short
July 3rd, 2008 11:29amIt's not your fault that you got lost. On the way to 'elegant' Portman Square (are you sure?), you got held up in the 'Bolsover Triangle'.
It's about the only part of London where cab drivers don't mind taking advice from locally-knowledged passengers.