Diary – 18 January 2018

My friend John Humphrys has managed to get on to the front pages again. We first met in the 1980s when I was a very junior bod on Today and he had just arrived to present. He was the same then as he is now: argumentative, hostile to authority of any kind, gimlet-focused on what people said (on and off air) but quick to smile too, and quick to laugh at himself. He was also uninterested in his own seniority at a time when the BBC was still as conscious of rank as the department store bosses in Are You Being Served? I don’t think Brian Redhead or John Timpson ever addressed a word to me but this new presenter would talk to anyone about anything. He still does: the other day, at four in the morning, he offered to show me his exercise regime. I had to hide in the loo.

John doesn’t do Twitter. Which, let’s face it, is wise. If it weren’t for Twitter I would have written an Important Novel. Instead, I find myself constructing rapier-sharp put-downs to online attacks. Which can take hours. And I never post them anyway because: BBC and all that. Anyway, I am quite fond of several regular critics. Among the band are ‘Thought for The Day’ fanatics, a sociologist from a Welsh university, the boss of a literary festival who says I should be demoted to newsreader (what an exquisite and telling sense of hierarchy that is!) and, my favourite by far, the astrology columnist of The Lady. This is not your bog-standard green ink.

Tipsy on the CNN presenter Christiane Amanpour’s champagne, I discover that the ‘leaving party’ she is throwing for her husband is not celebrating that kind of leaving (phew)but an ever-upwards and still conjoined success.