Dylan Jones
Diary - 28 July 2006
Everyone has Cameron Tourette’s these days
It’s been a busy week. There was Charles Finch’s dinner for Cate Blanchett at Drones (Jack Nicholson as louche as ever; Juliette Lewis surprisingly normal); a Calvin Klein dinner at Locanda Locatelli, the YSL Serpentine party and the BSME party at the Ritz. Everyone has Cameron Tourette’s these days, and you can’t go anywhere without being bombarded with opinions about the Vigorous Young Leader. Having done more fieldwork than is strictly necessary, I’d say that six out of ten people I meet want to vote for him, with, on the one hand, people like Links chairman John Ayton saying, ‘His world is bigger than politics’, and those on the other wondering where all the policies went. This week one ridiculously famous actress told me, ‘My problem with him is the fact he’s not sexy. Although compared to Blair he’s Daniel Craig.’
I like DC a lot, but, having just read Compassionate Conservatism, the manifesto produced by Policy Exchange, I’m not sure decentralisation is such a sexy proposition. Not on a broad scale, anyway. No, what we want is a serious commitment to overhauling the criminal justice system. After all, it wasn’t the Tories who badgered John Reid into shaking up the Home Office, it was the media.
I went to Le Caprice for lunch twice this week, and I don’t say that to show off, just to illustrate the fact that it has, over the years, become the Condé Nast canteen. So much so that when it sprouts in New York next year it is opening right next door to the CN headquarters. In September it celebrates 25 years as the restaurant of choice for the ladies (and occasional gentlemen) who lunch, a quarter of a century during which it has catered for everyone from Princess Diana to Jeffrey Archer. My favourite story involves a friend who, after several glasses of champagne, encouraged his luncheon companion to remove her bra without removing her dress; rather remarkably, she was successful. In case you visit Le Caprice and would like to know how important you are, the best table is No.7, by the window, followed in descending order by 6, 5 and 10 (adjacent to 7), then 21, 20 and 22 on the opposite side by the wall. And if you’re offered table 11, you might want to think about not going again.
My agent, Ed Victor, calls from his home on Long Island. He wants to know what parties there have been, what the gossip is. He wants to know why all these people dare to have parties while he’s away. I tell him that because he is such a diligent attender, people are using his absence as an opportunity to invite party people they usually don’t have room for. Ed buys this line but re-emphasises the fact that when he’s back on 5 September he expects all this benevolence to stop.
Ed is flying in for our annual GQ Men of the Year awards, which we are holding at the Royal Opera House, and at the moment not a day goes by without some sort of drama. In times of stress I like to repeat film director Ron Howard’s favourite motto: ‘Panic is not our friend.’ The event has turned into something of a celeb-fest, and, although few people believe me, most of them are angels. Sometimes their PRs get a little jumpy (a Hollywood publicist once insisted that her client’s limo should have bullet-proof windows, even though his hotel was only 200 yards away), but generally they’re fine. On the night, we try to speak to everyone, making sure they’re happy and have everything they need, and most people are relatively low-maintenance. Most, that is. Last year during dinner, as I bent over to ask if a particular celebrity was OK, she took her fork out of her mouth, smiled and said, ‘Not really.’ Nancy isn’t invited this year.
Since it opened in 1985, I have spent rather a lot of time in the Groucho Club, although these days I only tend to go there after I’ve been somewhere else, late, and in need of refreshment. I’m always glad I do though, because I’ll always bump into someone I know, or meet someone I wanted to. This happened recently, when I was introduced to Patrick Cockburn, the Independent’s man in Iraq. And he really is their man in Iraq, as the Indy is one of the few papers to have a staff man on the ground, while many now simply rely on the ambitions of freelancers. GQ had Sean Langan there for a while, but we’ve now sent him to Afghanistan, where he’s been for three long, dark, arid months. I know that if anyone can infiltrate the Taleban, he can. Simon Kelner, the Independent’s editor, always tells me that whenever someone starts singing ‘American Pie’, then it’s time to go home. Tonight in the Groucho (it’s karaoke night) as Simon and Tracey Emin launch into ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’. I make my excuses and leave.
A trip to the Billionaire nightclub in Sardinia is abandoned as it would mean missing our girls’ last day at school. My children are now fairly au fait with what I do for a living. A few Sundays ago, as we prepared to venture up to Hampstead for lunch with friends, I made the dutiful stop at the local newsagent to pick up the papers (all six of them). Georgie, my five-year-old, said, ‘Daddy, I don’t know why you buy all those papers. You never read them.’ Quick as a flash my seven-year-old, Edie, shot back with, ‘Oh, he does read them. Then he copies it into his own language.’