Diary – 1 November 2012

Air Canada has outwitted the superstorm and I am about to return to Canada after my nine-day stay in London following an absence of seven years, and nine years since I actually lived there. I was launching the British edition of my book, A Matter of Principle, which describes the legal onslaught against me in the United States that consumed most of those years. As these matters have been amply aired in the London media this past week, I avoid them here. As Truman Capote famously said to a British (male) television interviewer, ‘Why don’t you read the book, darling?’

The Sunday Times sent the notorious Camilla Long, beaming, bearing chocolates and bulging out of her eye-catching bloomer-suit, to ask one of Canada’s leading barristers, in whose offices we met, if he were my assistant, before writing her hit-job. I arranged a telephone interview with the Mail on Sunday’s very professional Elizabeth Sanderson to counteract the Long mugging, after so many from News Corp and my former friend Murdoch these nine years. Anticipating it, and some of the other pyrotechnics that followed, I reflected that, with many conspicuous personal exceptions, the London media are the lowest mutation of human life I have encountered (except for American prosecutors), and that does not exclude the many hundreds of people I met in the US Federal prisons to which I was sent for a total of three years, and where I was proud to serve for crimes I manifestly did not commit.

That preemptive comment on that fetid and narcissistic infestation of self-obsessed, drearily predictable, lazy, reckless self-exalted wits was proudly upheld by Adam Boulton, incapable of a civil syllable, and Ian Hislop, a whey-faced jack-in-the-box who has not, as I reminded him, advanced much beyond his opening publication Passing Wind and his apprenticeship to that appalling hypocrite Richard Ingrams.