Trial and tribulation

It’s a topsy-turvy world when the deputy editor of The Spectator, a lady, is in Afghanistan, while the High life correspondent of the same magazine cowers in a Belgravia basement wearing full body armour and his Wehrmacht helmet. Obviously, it should be the other way round, but now it’s a woman’s world and we men have been put out to pasture. And it gets worse. Apparently, while about to go out ‘in the field’, Mary Wakefield was told ‘rather you than me’ by a private security man. ‘Better an IED [improvised explosive device] than Taki,’ answered my fiancée, making me angry as hell and not willing to take it any more.

And speaking of trashing Taki, I noticed last week that Sir Philip Otton, former Lord Justice of Appeal, had the same birthday as Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of the Bagel. The two men have something else in common. Both tried to ruin my life and partly succeeded. Otton presided over a libel case brought against my person and the Speccie in 1986 by a woman who claimed I had called her an old tart. I had not but had intimated that she gave away her favours like a Frisbee. (The old girl left us about ten years ago while swimming in her pool in Argentina, just like that other high-class tart, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman did in the pool of the Paris Ritz, where else?)

Otton made that infamous German judge Roland Freisler look like Mother Teresa. He instructed the jury in the manner I would had I the fortune to preside over the crimes of Robert Mugabe or Tony Blair. He asked me twice while I was in the dock what the word Taki meant.