High life | 14 May 2015

OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilised men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for Britain. I was convinced throughout the campaign that a certain testicular fortitude was missing on the part of the voters, and that David Cameron would be vacating No. 10. But, not for the first time, I was proved wrong. The only testicular fortitude missing was when Ed Balls lost his seat. So now we’ll have five more years of furious lefty hacks passing more wind than usual. There is nothing that angers Guardianistas more than when good, hard-working people vote with their brains. Tilting against the windmills of envy and class warfare might sound like a loser, but the election result showed that the Brits possess testicular fortitude, as well as nous. Take it from Taki, this could be the start of something big: reform of the undemocratic EU. No more European superstate, no more dominance from Brussels, no more foreign judges issuing left-wing human-rights ukases. It’s all up to David Cameron, and I sure hope he succeeds. Mind you, only the heartless can fail to sympathise with Ed Miliband, but he can always advise Channel 4 or write a column in the Guardian.

Things have been hunky-dory over on these shores too. At lunch with Harvey Weinstein and Michael Mailer at Harvey’s Tribeca Grill, we were discussing a film version of the greatest book ever written apart from the Bible, Nothing to Declare. I was flattered, but when talk turned to casting I quoted Deborah Ross: ‘Only Taki can play Taki.’ She wrote this in her review of the greatest movie ever made, Seduced & Abandoned. The trouble is that Taki no longer looks so good.