It has been a most nerve-racking week, whose trauma has seemed quite impervious even to the ministrations of Valium. I speak, of course, of my concern for Katy Harris and Martin Platt, the Mandy Smith and Bill Wyman of Coronation Street, who have just unleashed news of Katy’s surprise pregnancy on her psychotic father Tommy. It will all end, I learn from the tabloids, in patricide then suicide — so I do hope Spectator readers weren’t hoping for the highlights from last week’s London social scene. Anyone expecting a diarist to forego death in Weatherfield for some book launch has either not read my column in the Guardian, and assumes it contains the occasional story gleaned from such events (the occasional story, even), or considers warm wine and the chance of glimpsing Andrew Roberts a superior sensation. I think there are people you can see for this.
Such has been the strain, in fact, that I almost felt unable to take to this page, relenting only on the basis that it has long been an ambition to be able to use — if only for one week — the totally hot phrase ‘my colleague Simon Heffer’. In fact, while I’m here, it would be a shame not to deploy ‘my colleague Taki’ too. Such a card. I forget whether or not he is still addressing black people as ‘Sambo’ but you really can’t beat him, can you? Pity …
Writing a newspaper diary means you do receive lots of invitations, all of which I decline, by which I mean rudely fail even to answer on the basis that they largely appear to have been sent by people in some kind of mental distress. Those binned this week include one to a nightclub in South Molton Street.
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