When I told my husband I had been asked to write the Spectator diary by the editor he retorted, ‘Nepotism.’ ‘No darling,’ I explained, ‘not Boris’ (whose brother Joe is married to my husband’s niece) ‘the new editor of The Spectator.’ ‘Ummm,’ he said, ‘so how do you want to come across in the diary?’ ‘Oh, you know,’ I said, ‘witty, clever, charming, likeable.’ ‘Ah’, he said, ‘better get someone else to write it, then.’ Of course, Matthew has every right to feel a little grumpy at the moment. He is a whip and a minister in the House of Lords and has been fielding dozens of calls a day from friends thinking what a wheeze it is to ask how much he loaned the government for his peerage. I could see it was all wearing a little thin when even our very smart bank manager couldn’t resist asking with a smile playing on his lips …and we were there to discuss our overdraft.
Six months ago I left a career in book publishing to run the William Morris office in London and become an agent. So here I sit, swamped by DVDs sent from our worldwide head of scripted TV. Parcels of them appear daily for me to deliver to my friend Ruthie Rogers: he is clearly in love with her — most people are. I asked Ruthie to come to dinner with us when he was over, and watched this brilliant, macho LA agent melt, captivated and entranced by Ruthie’s extensive knowledge of everything from the first to the last series of 24, Spooks, Life on Mars. In my 20 years of speaking to Ruthie three times a day, I have never spoken to her about what happened in the last episode of Lost. I tackled her about this in the next day’s early-morning phone call. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I love your new job. I can’t wait to get all those lovely DVDs and not the 800-page Serbo–Croatian novels you’ve been sending me for 20 years.’
Flew to Galway on Monday following in the trail of one of the most remarkable women I have ever seen. I saw The Exonerated at the Riverside Studios. It’s a play about six people who were on Death Row in the States, one of whom is a tiny woman called Sunny Jacobs, who was on stage playing herself, radiating a spirit of such courage and human kindness that long after the play finished I couldn’t get her or her story out of my head. Sunny, her husband and her two small children were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she was erroneously charged with the murder of two policemen in Florida and sent to Death Row in 1976 — one of only two women ever to be sent there. She went in a wife, a mother and a daughter, and emerged 17 years later a widow, an orphan and a grandmother.
Race home to change before joining our bestselling author John Berendt and the glorious Venetian artist Ludovico De Luigi for an event. I had planned to whisk them both off to the Ivy for a little dinner afterwards with Salman Rushdie and the beautiful Padma, only to find we were not to be five or even six for dinner, but in true Italian style we were 18, and they all loved the sound of the Ivy. The evening was saved by the magnificent David Roberts, who people tell me is the new Charles Saatchi of modern art, who took us all — by now we were nearly 30 — to his local restaurant.
It was my birthday this week, and, remembering Robert Frost’s great line, ‘A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age’, I realise that none of my friends are diplomats.
To tea with Oxford’s first professor of internet governance, the extremely youthful Jonathan Zittrain. Over Earl Grey he painted a world where if you were to walk into a café in Paris, your little everything-machine would bleep if there was anyone you knew there, giving you their exact location. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Is this the death of the affair? Will one never ever be able to sneak away undetected?’ Apparently you can switch your little beeper thing off. But then it would be like being the undead, and everyone would stare at you anyway.
Julian Barnes called to ask us to dinner next week. Must remind him Matthew is only eating swan at the moment — new government initiative to allay the public’s fear over the transmission of avian flu through poultry. John Gummer’s daughter survived the BSE hamburger, so I hope Matthew will be all right.
Spent the weekend with super-agent Michael Sissons and his glorious wife Serena; dinner with the Fearnley-Whittingstalls and Judy and Douglas Hurd. In Hollywood when people die, they don’t ask did he or she leave a will, but did he or she leave a diary? As an agent one totally understands this, and I feel much the same about politicians. As conversation turned that way, endearingly Douglas Hurd admitted to keeping a book to record jokes he heard that he thought he might be able to use again.
So Sunday night, comfortably sitting before our illegal log fire in the heart of London as Matthew flips through the Sundays and I through manuscripts. He thoughtfully tosses me a little book free with one of the newspapers: all you need to know about cosmetic surgery. I love him, but I guess he never will be a diplomat.
Caroline Michel is managing director of the William Morris Agency (UK) Ltd.
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