Diary – 6 August 2004

Las Vegas

Whatever else we import from American politics, please let us avoid the appalling new practice of requiring children to give testimonials on behalf of their parents. I was sitting with my 11-year-old daughter in our VIP suite in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, waiting for John Kerry to come on CNN, when my blood ran cold. Not one but two Kerry daughters were produced to give speeches in praise of Kerry the loving Pop. This is America, of course, where top politics has Hollywood production values, and both speeches were impeccably charming. One of the girls, Alexandra, told of the time when the Kerry hamster fell, in its cage, off a New England dock, and the weeping Kerry children watched it bubble to the depths. It was a reverse Chappaquidick, with the hamster as Mary Jo Kopechne, and Kerry an anti-Teddy Kennedy, hurling himself after the trapped critter. The tale will have done him no end of good. But is it really right to ask children to give these crucial reviews of our political suitability, like the teenage delators of Ceausescu’s Romania? I stole a glance at my daughter. She was watching beadily.

We startled room service at 4 a.m. by having smoked salmon, bagels, cream cheese, waffles, strawberries, syrup, bacon, pints of cawfee and OJ. Outside Vegas winked and strobed with colossal neon representations of rhinestone-covered buttocks, and I felt Mark Steyn-style surges of enthusiasm for America and her energy. This town is expanding by 7,000 per month, and all night long — we watched — the hard-hatted ants crawl over the west wing of Caesars Palace. In Britain we are so nocturnally idle that we are punching out barely 1.7 kids per mum, and if we were inclined to build a hotel in the middle of the night, we’d be forbidden by the EU Working Time Directive.

One of the points of being in Vegas is to study the impact of gambling on the soul.