It's about Radio 1, and it covers in lavish detail the back-biting, the hatreds, the rivalries and the agony of trying to get listeners back. I've been reading with fascination a book I got at Christmas called The Nation's Favourite, by Simon Garfield (Faber, £9.99). I don't want to sound like a crusty old bore, but it's a risk I'm always prepared to take. It wouldn't make much of a splash in Hello! but it would spare us all a lot of annoyance. I attended an excellent wedding in Hounslow not long ago the floral arrangements were particularly fine, and the registrar charming. Given that the horrors of the marriage seem to depend on the magnificence of the wedding, perhaps they ought to go the whole way and hold it in a registry office. It makes a painful recollection, and since the royal family have inflicted the experience on the nation three times, it's thoughtful of them not to risk it again. When friends break up, the most poignant memory is of the wedding and its unfulfilled hopes: the couple's faces shining with happiness, the solemn excitement of the bridesmaids, the chums who have flown in from all round the world, and the blend of panic and pride on the face of the bride's father, as he watches thousands of his own money disappear down the faces of people he barely knows. I don't think I could have coped with another big one. Thank goodness the latest royal wedding is to be downbeat and semi-private. It's that too many of them just don't have the brains for the task in hand.
The real scandal about this lot isn't that they hate each other lots of politicians do. But his bellowed briefings down the mobe at the Red Lion pub, in the manner of a plumber fixing an emergency job, sent a signal to the rest of the world that the Treasury was in the hands of incompetent point-scoring amateurs.
Only Mandy himself didn't see that.Īt least Charlie Whelan is recognisably a human being and good company too. Yet what Mandelson did was no less inappropriate and no less crass. If you employed a barrister who said, 'tell you what, mate, we'll try slipping five hundred quid to the judge,' you'd fire him. Yet he himself was the most unpopular member of the Government and clearly had no idea whatever how we would react to news of an enormous sweetheart loan from a man dependent partly on his patronage, and whom his own department was investigating for possible fraud. Here was a man whose job was telling the Prime Minister the public mood and how it could be altered. But identifying and manipulating public perception was what Peter Mandelson was supposed to excel at.
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Perhaps Einstein wouldn't have known how to place an accumulator bet. It's a cliche that very intelligent people often lack common sense.
Like Tom Wolfe's anti-hero, they confuse their small world with the planet the rest of us inhabit. The vainglorious braggartism of Derek Draper last year gives you a flavour of what they really think about themselves: Masters of the Universe, every one. I 've said it often - the point about the spin doctors and media manipulators employed by New Labour is that they're not very clever.
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