Diary – 16 June 2016

Flabby, vaguely disorientated and, more than three years on, still struggling with stroke recovery, I am on a radical diet. No booze, no caffeine of any kind, no lots of other things — sausages, bacon, roast meat, you name it. Not a lot of fun, but the revelation has been coffee: for well over 40 years I have believed that I can only function in the morning after pints of coal-black, extremely strong caffeine. And now, aged 57, I find that it was total horlicks all along — I feel perkier, less tired and less stressed (after a hard few days) without the stuff. This makes me a real oddity in a country in which coffee has become a massive popular cult. I wander around Baristastan, passing ’Bucks, Costas and Neros, feeling a bit like a Wahhabi in Soho at chucking-out time.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen in our referendum. But for the past three or four weeks I have felt things are going Brexit’s way. The polls, which I don’t believe, are only now catching up on Marr sampling. One of the very few advantages of having an — ahem! — distinctive televised face is that people come up and tell you, often out of the side of the mouth, what they think. Over the past few weeks I’ve been filming all over Britain. Everywhere I go, from cafés (‘hot water please’) to trains and airports, walking down the street or lazing on a Scottish island, I hear, ‘Psst, I’m for out.’ I’ve heard it from Scottish nationalists, red-hot socialists and Tories alike. It’s utterly unscientific, of course, but if I had trusted this kind of informal street chatter during the general election I’d have realised exactly what was going on. I didn’t. I listened to the polls and the commentators.