As any good Spectator subscriber knows, Joan Collins is a national institution. The Hollywood star took centre stage at last night’s big Thatcher Centre bash to mark one hundred years since the Iron Lady’s birth. Boris Johnson reminisced about Collins’ diaries when he edited this august outlet some twenty years ago. But it was left to Sir Conor Burns, the former MP for Bournemouth West, to deliver the best line about the Golden Globe winner. Having joked that any future autobiography ought to be called ‘Dominated by Blondes‘, given his friendship with both Thatcher and Johnson, he introduced Collins thus:
Her performances are known, I imagine, to everyone in this room… The Wayward Bus, the Bitter End, Tales from the Crypt, Seven Thieves, Rally Around The Flag Boys, the Bitch, An Orgy of the Damned. It’s almost as though she was chronicling the modern Conservative party. But there is no truth that Empire of the Ants was based on Rishi.
Collins duly collected the Centre’s ‘Best of British’ award, remarking how Mrs Thatcher ‘stood up to all the men, who I think a lot of them had a crush on her – maybe some of them are still here.’ Johnson certainly exhibited his own admiration in his speech when reflecting on the failure of the Nobel Peace Prize committee to recognise the claims of President Donald Trump:
I have the perfect solution for their embarrassment because they could, of course, go for another Western leader with even more outrageously fruitful pineapple coloured hair, quite as equally capable of driving the left into paroxysms of carpet chewing frenzy. But whose credentials, if properly assessed by the Oslo committee, are better not just than any living politician, but better than almost any politician – better than any politician I could think of in the last 50 years.
Cue the inevitable punchline: ‘Margaret Hilda Roberts’. It left the attendant guests cheering, as the Tory backbenchers once did, for ‘more, more, more!’
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