Status Anxiety: Don’t mention the movies

Flicking through George W. Bush’s memoirs, one thing that jumped out was the way in which the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom chose to occupy their time together when they first met on W’s ranch in Texas. They spent the evening watching Meet the Parents.

Now you might think that’s fairly unusual. Couldn’t they have done something more useful with those few precious hours, such as discussing climate change? Some readers will conclude that this was typical of Bush and Blair, two fundamentally frivolous men.

In fact, this is absolutely normal. That’s what heads of state do when they get together — they watch movies. And when they’re not doing that, they talk about movies. How do I know this? Because Mrs Kofi Annan told me.

Rewind to December 1997. I was living in New York at the time and my friend Vijay Parmar invited me to tag along with him to Kofi Annan’s daughter’s birthday party. I had never met her, but the party was in the UN Secretary General’s official residence and this would be an opportunity to check it out. I thought, ‘What the hell. I might get a column out of it.’

Vijay and I turned up on the doorstep dressed in our party clothes and each clutching a bottle of plonk. We were slightly taken aback when the door was opened by what looked like a coach driver straight out of Walt Disney’s Cinderella. He took the bottles from us and, holding them at arm’s length, led us to a large, empty sitting room. What was going on?

Vijay and I had barely had enough time to exchange quizzical glances when Kofi himself strode into the room, followed by Nane, his beautiful Swedish wife.