The Digested Twenty-first Century

by John Crace

  Samedi, le 1 novembre. French is so sophisticated and sensual. It also reminds you that I’m middle-class and respectable, because no one’s really interested in working-class or foreign prostitutes. Did I mention that I am actually rather clever? Oh, I did. Well, Martin Amis is cool.

  Vendredi, le 12 décembre. My nipples are clamped and a bald-headed man is pissing on me in the bath. I knew that would get your attention.

  Mardi, le 27 janvier. I have some wonderfully fascinating ex-boyfriends. Let’s call them A1, A2, A3 and A4. We talk about sex all the time. A2 was telling me about his new girlfriend who is into latex. ‘Must be very hot,’ I observed.

  Mercredi, le 18 février. My parents wouldn’t be very happy if they knew what I did for a living. I went to see them in Yorkshire last week and we went for a walk before watching Countdown on the television.

  Mardi, le 9 mars. My publisher tells me the book needs more smut. Anal sex is the new oral. My friends have been doing it for years and I scarcely raise an eyebrow when a client asks for it.

  Lundi, le 22 mars. Went shopping for lingerie with A3. I love buying knickers. Even call girls have their favourites. Had dinner with A4, and my latest lover, The Boy, walked into the same restaurant. The Boy repeatedly told me he loved me. Our relationship is over.

  Jeudi, le 8 avril. I can tell you’re waiting for me to say something profound. Dream on. I don’t have any difficult feelings about being a prostitute. Everything’s just fine. Got it? I’m just as happy fucking an ugly stranger as I am a handsome lover. The only difference is that I never come with my clients, even when I’m being fisted.

  Dimanche, le 2 mai. Sometimes I lie about my age to clients. Sometimes I even lie to my friends. I guess you must be wondering whether I’m lying now.

  Mercredi, le 16 juin. More smut. I always wax. The clients prefer it and it’s much better for lesbian sex. A4 asked for a threesome when I mentioned this.

  Samedi, le 26 juin. The madam has been giving me less work, but I don’t mind because I never mind about anything. A client told me he didn’t pay me for sex. He paid me to go away. I wonder if book buyers have the same attitude.

  Digested read, digested: A new variation on taking the piss.

  Don’t You Know Who I Am?

  by Piers Morgan (2007)

  Introduction: For more than 20 years I worked in Fleet Street, but everything changed on May 14 2004, when I was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror for publishing hoax photographs that could have been real if they weren’t faked. Having no obvious talent, there was only one thing I could do. Become a celebrity.

  August 2004: ITV invite me to appear on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! ‘That’s just a step too far,’ I reply grandly. ‘You might be right there,’ the researcher says. ‘Forget it. You’re too much of a nonentity even for us.’

  November 2004: Michael Ancram is the first guest on my new hard-hitting political-interview TV show, Morgan and Platell. I think it could be huge.

  February 2005: Star-studded turn-out for the launch of my autobiography, The Insider, for which I was paid a £1.2m advance. Jade Goody is there. ‘I never read mine,’ she says. ‘Who wrote yours?’ I blush. ‘I did it all myself.’ Did I mention I got an advance of £1.2m? Go on to dinner at the Ivy but nobody famous is there so it is a waste of time.

  March 2005: Get drunk and name-drop some famous people. Michael Parkinson calls to invite me to lunch; on discovering I’m not Pierce Brosnan, he rings off quickly with, ‘Got to go. Some other time.’ What a star that man is.

  April 2005: Matthew Freud rings to suggest we buy the UK Press Gazette. ‘With you as editor,’ he laughs, ‘we can run it into the ground in next to no time.’

  June 2005: There will be no new series of Morgan and Platell. Take everyone famous I know to lunch at the Ivy. They all promise to be my best friend so long as I continue to pay for everything.

  August 2005: That fat, talentless fool Jeremy Clarkson has been rubbishing me to the media again. Just let it go, Jeremy. Face it, you are never going to be as famous as me.

  October 2005: GQ editor Dylan Jones has come up with a cracking idea. He wants me to get really pissed with some minor celebrities, chat to them about sex and stuff and then write about it as if it were vaguely interesting. First up is the ridiculously beautiful Telegraph diarist Celia Walden. ‘Why are you so utterly clever and gorgeous?’ I swoon incisively. ‘Will you shag me?’ She smiles radiantly. ‘Only when I’m really desperate,’ she slurs. I’m definitely in with a chance then!

  December 2005: Send five lorries full of red roses and 25 cases of the finest Cristal champagne to Celia. ‘You’re acting like a D-list celeb,’ she texts sweetly. ‘Keep it up.’

  February 2006: Take everyone famous I know to lunch at the Ivy. They all still promise to be my best friend, so long as I continue to pay for everything.

  March 2006: One of my best friends, Simon Cowell, tells me he is going to try and get me a job as a judge on America’s Greatest Talent. ‘You’re not very bright, you’re overweight and you’re hopelessly in love with yourself,’ he says. ‘You’ll be perfect.’

  May 2006: Invited on to Question Time and come up against Jack Straw. ‘So what about WMD?’ I deftly point out. Straw is skewered. ‘Tu es le Paxman de nos jours,’ Celia coos afterwards as we embrace. We are now an item.

  June 2006: I am now the biggest star in America. I’m on TV with David Hasselhoff and someone else and I’ve even got my own trailer. Thank God my kids got in to Charterhouse so they don’t interrupt my celebrity lifestyle.

  August 2006: How come no one in Britain apart from Sharon Osbourne has heard of America’s Greatest Talent? Simon Cowell invites me to lunch at the Ivy where someone recognises me. ‘Aren’t you Diarmuid Gavin?’

  October 2006: Bump into Michael Winner in the toilets. He tells me what brand of sweets he likes. What a scoop for Celia’s award-winning diary.

  December 2006: Celia rings to invite me to Tatler’s Brain-dead, Nonentity Couple of the Year Awards. I remind her we don’t have a ticket. ‘They’ll let us in anyway,’ she simpers. Hooray. I’m now officially a celebrity.

  Digested read, digested: Yes, but we still don’t care.

  Snowdon by Anne de Courcy (2008)

  On May 6 1960, Antony Armstrong-Jones, known as Tony, stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waved to the cheering crowd. He was at the peak of his powers and yet there was only one thought on his mind. Why had he married the Queen’s dwarfish sister when he could have had the fabled society beauty and sometime Daily Mail feature writer, Anne de Courcy?

  There was nothing in Tony’s upbringing to indicate the extraordinary and unselfish life that he himself would lead. His parents, both commoners, divorced when he was five and it was only Tony’s resilience and talent that carried him through the hardship of his early years at Eton. ‘Tony was a spiffing chap,’ says his old school friend, Freddy Cholmondely-Bowles-Binkerton. ‘He always made us laugh in Latin lessons.’

  Tragedy almost struck when Tony was diagnosed with polio when he was 16. Without his strength of will and exquisite good looks, he might have succumbed to the disease, yet Tony pulled through, and vowed to dedicate his life to helping the handicapped.

  Tony decided to become a professional photographer and with no help at all from his favourite uncle, the celebrated designer Oliver Messel, or his extensive network of upper-class dilettantes, he soon made a name for himself as the most pre-eminent artist of the London scene. He was also wonderfully tolerant in his attitudes. When the Kabaka of Buganda booked a sitting he told his assistant, a cheerful cockney, that although the Kabaka was black, he was royal and therefore should be allowed to use the toilet.

  Tony moved in a fast set in the 50s, and his animal magnetism made him irresistible to both sexes. I wouldn’t want to be so vulgar as to say categorically that he might have been a homosexualist but I’m happy to infer that his relationship with the gloriously effete Jeremy Fry might have strayed beyond
the bounds of normal aristocratic platonic idealism. And if it did, it was far removed from the vile buggery of the lower orders.

  Women also threw themselves at Tony’s perfectly chiselled body, and his sense of noblesse oblige led him into a lifelong string of affairs, one of which continues to this day. In order not to cause any distress to the living, I have chosen not to reveal this woman’s name, though once she has croaked I will be happy to expose her in the Mail.

  Princess Margaret was overwhelmed by Tony’s physicality. ‘I’d have shagged him a great deal sooner,’ she once joked over a pint of gin and 60 Gauloises, ‘if I hadn’t thought he was queer’. They became the golden couple of the jeunesse dorée de leurs jours and no social gathering was complete without Ken Tynan or Peter Sellers fawning at their feet.

  Tony’s talents were etched deep into the global memory with his timeless handling of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. Possessed of such gifts, Tony was forced into more affairs with some of the world’s most beautiful women. Margaret had no such excuse for her squalid cavortings with Robin and Roddy, and Tony was deeply hurt by her betrayal. ‘I’ve only ever wanted what’s right for my children and the Queen,’ he said when the separation was announced.

  Enduring the pain of the title forced on him, Tony sought solace in his second wife Lucy and any other woman lucky enough to meet him. Sadly, Lucy failed to understand how Tony’s artistic genius and tireless work for the handicapped excused his affairs, and the couple separated. Melanie Cable-Alexander, a journalist half his age, tried to trap his restless creativity by getting pregnant. ‘I’m extremely proud to be Jasper’s father,’ he said through gritted teeth, after being forced into a DNA test. Another DNA test revealed that Tony had also fathered a daughter with his best friend’s wife more than 40 years before.

  Yet, despite these trifling annoyances, Tony remains the gentlest, most handsome and greatest of living Englishmen. And as he moves serenely towards his 80s, he continues to shag anything that moves. Except me. Sadly.

  Digested read, digested: Please shag me too, Tony.

  Going Rogue: An American Life

  by Sarah Palin (2009)

  It was the Alaska State Fair, August 2008. I passed the Right to Life stand with my daughter’s face on their poster. ‘That’s you, baby-girl,’ I said to Piper. ‘There’s no member of this family your momma wouldn’t sell out to promote her career.’ As we watched three commy abortionists being burned to death, Senator McCain called my cell phone. Would I like to help him lose the presidential race?

  My parents moved to Alaska when I was three and I fell in love with the outdoors and killing things. Swearing the Oath of Allegiance in school gave me a sense of civic pride and I vowed to serve America and go to church a lot.

  After coming runner-up, and last, in the Miss Alaska pageant, I married Todd Palin, a guy with his own snow mobile. Todd blessed me with five children: Track, ‘we’d have called him hockey if he’d been born in the winter’; Bristol, ‘Todd said he hoped she’d have a rack like mine’; Willow, ‘we misspelled pillow’; Piper, ‘after our light aircraft’; and Trig, ‘short for the trigger on our AK47’.

  ‘Dang it,’ I thought, ‘this election campaign is getting mighty dirty.’ But Todd told me God had a purpose for me and after praying for his guidance, I was duly elected mayor of Wasilla by nine votes to six. Various stories have been told about how I dismissed a librarian for stocking anti-American literature on evolution and how I tried to get my brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper. Well I don’t have space in this 400-page book to go into this in any detail, but if I did I would say that anyone who messes with God or my family has to deal with this pitbull in lipstick!

  My proudest moment in office was seeing off an attempt by the police chief to introduce gun and alcohol controls. I hate liberals who don’t understand how things work in the 49th State. It is a God-given right for any Alaskan to get drunk and take out anything that moves. Why else did God create guns? Would He have made animals out of meat if He had wanted us to be vegetarians?

  Having served on the Oil Commission, I realised that Alaskan politics was rife with corruption and the waste of public funds, and when I was elected governor in 2006 by 73 votes to 59, I vowed to end pork-barrel politics. Mysteriously, though, I find I have omitted my initial support for the ‘Bridge to Nowhere, Jobs for the Boys’ scheme, a $300m construction project to build a bridge to reach 11 people. I would rather now concentrate on my vice-presidential campaign.

  ‘Tell me what you know about American foreign policy,’ McCain said, when we met at his ranch in Arizona.

  ‘About as much as the average American,’ I replied. ‘So that’s nothing, then.’ ‘Hell, Senator. I don’t need to know anything about the history of the Middle East to know the Iraqis are all a bunch of Russian Czechoslovakian Shiites.’

  ‘Where do you stand on God?’

  ‘Sarah Palin won’t hold back on God, Senator. I’m proud to believe in the book of Genesis that says the Garden of Eden was in Alaska. Jeez, every December I even go out hunting dinosaurs.’

  For some reason I didn’t get to see much of Senator McCain after this and although there were great moments, such as talking to President Sarkozy of Paris, Texas on the phone, our campaign never really took off and we were narrowly beaten by 250m votes to 23.

  The mud-slinging started in earnest once we returned to Alaska. Rumours about my marriage circulated – dang it, why would I want to divorce a man with the biggest skidoo in Anchorage? – but most damaging were the complaints about my ethical conduct, all of which have been dismissed except the ones that haven’t. So I won’t be standing for governor again. But if the American people are as stupid as I think they are, it’s Palin for president in ‘12!

  Digested read, digested: Going Rouge, An American Embarrassment.

  Must You Go?

  by Antonia Fraser (2010)

  1975: I meet Harold at my sister’s. ‘Must You Go?’ he asks, as I get up to leave. We talk until dawn. Harold: I am loopy about you. Me: I would make a very good secretary. Harold: The same thought had occurred to me. Harold sends me a poem. ‘My darling Antonia/I just had to phone ya.’ I am thrillingly in love, though it is terribly awkward as I am heppily married to Hugh, and Harold is heppily married to Vivien except when he is having affairs. Luckily our children Orlando, Pericles, Immaculata and Stigmata just want me to be heppy.

  1976: Take Harold to meet my uncle, the writer Anthony Powell. Tony asks me if Harold is one of the Northumberland Pinters. I shake my head. ‘Oh,’ says Tony, before circling the table in a clockwise direction to pour himself another glass of port. Harold sends me another poem. ‘My heart goes va-va-voom/When you walk in the room.’ His genius is irresistible. He and Hugh have a naked wrestling match in front of the fire while reciting Orlando Furioso, after which Hugh gives us his blessing to move in together. I am the heppiest woman alive.

  1977: Harold and I have a long chat about money. Frankly, we are down to our last two castles and we are flat broke. We open a bottle of champagne and go to dinner at the Connaught to cheer ourselves up. The phone rings. It is Melvyn, Larry, Ralph and Trevor all calling to say Harold is a genius. I have to agree with them. We get home and Harold recites Eliot. He does so brilliantly.

  1980: To Sissinghurst where Harold learns bridge, confirming my theory he has a naturally brilliant brain. We then join Tom Stoppard for a game of cricket. Harold scores a scintillating 1 before writing me another poem. ‘Your radiance divine/Is mine, all mine.’ If he wasn’t such an outstanding playwright, they would have to make him poet laureate.

  1982: I continue to beaver away at my little histories while Harold creates his masterpieces in his Super-Study. He is in a furious temper because he can’t make the second act of A Kind of Alaska work. He says he can’t write any more. I glance at his notes. Me: You really haven’t lost it at all. Harold: That was my shopping list.

  1985: Harold is in New York t
o direct a production of No Man’s Land. He rings to say he has a slight cold. I can’t bear the thought of him alone in his hotel room. How I long to mop his fevered brow! Luckily he recovers and the reviews for the play are, of course, marvellous. He sends me another poem. ‘Such beauty, such grace/The smile on your face.’ I really do think it’s the best thing he’s ever written.

  1988: At some point in the last few years, it appears that Hugh and Vivien have both died. But I do not want to dwell on unheppy things. And Harold and I are both so very heppy. We have Daniel Ortega and Vaclav Havel to dinner and are heppy to hear both plan to stage The Homecoming once democracy is restored to their countries. Salman was also present. His fatwa is too, too awful, but he is such a handsome man.

  1995: Harold and I are the heppiest we have ever been now Dada has finally accepted our marriage. Harold has decided to return to acting and is quite brilliant in Betrayal. Jeremy Irons and Claire Bloom say it is terribly unfair he should be the world’s greatest actor as well as the world’s greatest writer. I am the luckiest woman alive.

  2005: Every theatre in the world is performing one of Harold’s plays. It is no more than he deserves. Harold is increasingly angry about the war in Iraq and he sends me another poem of transcendent beauty. ‘Without you at my feet/I am incomplete/Just like the widows in Baghdad/Whose husbands have been murdered/By that fucking war criminal Blair.’ So sweet!

  2008: Despite filling the house with the scent of freesias, I am very, very unheppy. Harold is dying. He writes me one last poem. ‘My heart is all yours/My death just a long pause.’

  Digested read, digested: Hark the Harold, angels sing.

  A Journey

  by Tony Blair (2010)

  I wanted this book to be different from the traditional political memoir. Most, I have found, are rather easy to put down. So what you will read here is not a conventional account of whom I met. There are events and politicians who are absent, not because they don’t matter, but because they are part of a different story to the self-serving one I want to tell!