Last week I received by post an invitation card from The Spectator office to the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards at the Savoy. My goodness, you should have seen this card. It was handsomely embossed, printed in beautiful copperplate, and so large that the postman couldn’t fit it through the letterbox. The Spectator requested ‘the pleasure of my company’, it said, and underneath there was a brief outline of the beano. From 12.30 p.m. we would be drinking Pol Roger champagne; at 1.15 we would be toddling in for the lunch and the awards ceremony; and at 3.45 ‘carriages’ would be outside to wheel away the fallen.
I was very excited. I hadn’t had a decent drink for about six weeks. I like to wipe the slate clean with a binge about once a month, but circumstances had conspired against it. And then I’d caught a virus which put me out of circulation. Now that I was back in the pink I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate. Spectator dos are always everything a person who enjoys a drink could possibly wish for. They don’t stint. They keep it coming. Express an anxiety about the supply situation at an Old Queen Street do and they laugh at you and show you a nearby room piled floor to ceiling with pristine cartons of top-notch gear. Apologise for overdoing things a little at a previous do and they look at you in surprise and say, ‘My dear fellow, we didn’t notice a thing. Have another?’
On the day, bright and early, suited and booted, I drove to the railway station. I didn’t take the invitation card with me as I couldn’t fit it into any of my pockets.
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