Tim Bell, the advertising guru who ran the Conservative account in the 1980s for Saatchi & Saatchi (or Starsky & Hutch, as Airey Neave used to call them), was in a gossipy mood at the China Exchange on Wednesday night. He said that he was invited to Downing Street by Cherie Blair when she was researching a book on prime ministers’ spouses and gave Tony the shock of his life after he walked in on them.
“It’s a coup!” Bell declared. Blair gave him a stony look. “I haven’t got a sense of humour when that sort of thing is concerned,” he snapped. Bell also claimed that Cherie had moaned to him about the lack of deference given to them. “You bloody well abolished deference,” he replied. “You’re married to the bloke who said ‘Call me Tony’.”
Jeremy Thorpe and the case of the murdered dog have been in the news again with a new biography. Many thought that his trial was an establishment stitch-up, but Bell says Margaret Thatcher believed he would be jailed. “If Thorpe is found innocent,” she told Bell, “I shall bring Profumo back to the cabinet and make him home secretary.”
Fleming family wisdom
Matthew Fleming, the former Kent cricketer, has been appointed as the next president of MCC — the youngest, at 51, for 36 years. It’s good to hear of an Old Etonian getting a top job for a change. The post will involve attending a lot of dinners and Fleming recalls some advice that his novelist uncle Ian once gave him: “One breast is not enough, but three is too much.” I think he was referring to chickens rather than Bond girls.
Circumcision makes no difference to penile sensitivity, according to a story in The Jewish Chronicle that a friend sent to me. There’s not an obvious joke in it, but it’s always good to receive a tip-off.
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American state of naivity
From the many American jokes still being sent in, here’s one from Andy Lumsden, who was in Cambridge when he saw a pair of tourists looking at a poster outside a chapel. “Oh look, they’re singing Bach’s St John Passion,” one said. “Do you think he wrote one for every college?” his friend replied. There was also an email from Michael Paling, who took a client out to a traditional English restaurant. Some items were new on her. “Skate wings?” she said. “What sort of bird is that?”
A party was held at St James’s Palace on Wednesday for Britain’s recent Oscar winners. Dame Judi Dench was surprised by the affection in the Prince of Wales’s handshake and kiss. “I think he thought I was his mother,” she told my lackey. At an event last year hosted by the Earl of Wessex, Dench, who has played Elizabeth I and Victoria, had conceded: “I’ve got a lot to thank your family for.”
Hugh on Willy
John Crace, my fellow political sketchwriter, and the critic John Sutherland have written some witty fresh takes on Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth for their Incomplete Shakespeare series. They were generously plugged on Twitter by the actor Hugh Bonneville, about whom we don’t see enough in the papers these days. “There’s a lot of Willy Waggledagger going about,” Bonneville wrote, which I think is his nickname for the Bard. I want to read more about Hugh and Mr Waggledagger.
