Boris and The Sextator farce

Fourteen years ago, almost to the day, Lloyd Evans and I received a note from Boris. It was the press night of Who’s The Daddy?, our play about the various sex scandals that had engulfed The Spectator in the previous 12 months, and we were terrified about how he’d react. As the editor of the magazine, he would have been within his rights to sack us, given how disloyal we’d been. We had portrayed him as a sex-mad buffoon with a portrait of Margaret Thatcher on his office wall that turned into a pull-down bed — in constant use throughout, needless to say. Not only that, but we’d sent up numerous other members of staff, including Kimberly Fortier, the publisher, Petronella Wyatt, the deputy editor, and Rod Liddle, the magazine’s star columnist. (Of the three, only Rod survives at The Spectator.) At that time, Lloyd and I were sharing the drama critic beat and if we’d behaved this badly at any other magazine we would have been crucified.