Diary – 29 November 2018

I got the sack the other day from the London Evening Standard, where I’ve been a weekly columnist for about a decade. ‘Belt-tightening’, I was told: Osbornean austerity claims another victim. As Fleet Street sinks giggling into the sea, a mini-tradition is emerging for long-serving hacks to grumble in the Spectator diary about losing regular work. Here, in recent months, have been Rachel Johnson (heave-ho from the Mail on Sunday) and Lynn Barber (heave-ho from the Sunday Times), so it was nice of the editor to offer me the opportunity now it’s my turn. Distinguished company, and the ritual serves everyone. As Kingsley Amis wrote:

Life is mostly grief and labour
Two things get you through.
Chortling when it hits a neighbour
Whingeing when it’s you.

It’s not my financial wellbeing that concerns me so much as my psychological outlook. If you’ve been writing columns once a week for any length of time, you get used to having opinions on things — even if, like mine, they’re generally of the toothless liberal-democratic kind. Opinions strike me as being a bit like boils: they need lancing if they’re not to turn nasty, and columns are a good place to lance them. But columns, of course, engender those boils in the first place. The natural and decent state of the ordinary person is not to hold opinions with any regularity. ‘Whatevs,’ sayeth the wise man. ‘Search me,’ sayeth the honest one. Having opinions is a mild form of mental disturbance, in other words, that can sometimes be turned to profit. My friend Philip Hensher, also an ex-columnist, assures me the condition passes after a few months. But the digital age may have changed that. Any fool can start a blog, and most of them have: the internet has made columnists of us all, with who knows what consequences for the general level of sanity.