High life | 28 September 2017

I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All I know is that I was 39 or 40 years old when the column began, and that I’ve just had my 81st birthday. Keeping a record is not my strong point, and it’s also a double-edged sword. I once planned to publish my diary, but then I stopped keeping one. I’d found passages in it that were dishonest, written in the heat of the moment, most likely under the influence, and the result was a bum-clenching embarrassment.

Now I don’t use any social media, certainly not Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, being a firm believer that Zuckerberg and Bezos should be locked up for life (Zuckerberg for not doing enough to tackle terrorist content). The pair’s crime is being much too ugly, and we all know that the ancient Greeks thought that looks were a mirror to one’s soul. What is more, we’ve all read the stories about how Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from two dumb Wasps, and how Bezos’s business is in the business of shutting down other businesses. Forty years in the pokey for each of them would make this a better world. And, incidentally, the world would be much more super-duper/ if we had more of Jacob Rees-Mogg/ and far less of Yvette Cooper.

The fact that this Cooper woman attacked Jacob for sticking to his religious beliefs is typical of politics today. What balls. She belongs on a dreary pavement outside a shoddy nightclub selling imitation Rolex watches, not in Parliament.

Otherwise London was fun. Catching up with so many old friends I hadn’t seen in quite a while was a mirror in itself, wrinkles and all that.