How can James Bond survive?

I have just got back from Cannes, where I was the president of a jury, judging TV dramas. I’ve never had an experience like it. I was put up at the Majestic Hotel, overlooking La Croisette. I had a limousine to take me all of 100 yards to the Grand Palais for screenings and when I chose to walk, I was provided with a bodyguard. I even had my own hairdresser and make-up artist for the nightly photoshoot on the pink carpet. It was all ridiculous of course but it gave me a rare glimpse of celebrity and its pernicious allure. We writers are usually consigned to the engine room, toiling away with sweaty faces and blackened fingers. How lovely, just for once, to be given a sunbed on the first-class deck.

I had a novel experience when I arrived at Nice airport. They stamped my passport! I mean… why? This is France, for heaven’s sake! It’s just next door. I know it’s wrong of me. I should be celebrating the multiple benefits that Brexit has so clearly brought to the nation and I’m certainly delighted with my blue passport, even if the last page does seem to be rather peculiarly bound with a useless strip of paper sticking out. But I still felt an overwhelming sadness watching that unwelcoming iron fist come crashing down. And it’s already clear, with all my European travel, I’m going to need a bigger passport.

I feel slightly hypocritical writing a diary for The Spectator when I’ve given up reading almost any news at all. It’s just unbearable, particularly the war in Ukraine. Every day we’re told about it, blow by blow, with pundits commenting on the action as if it’s a sort of gigantic football match.