Diary – 19 July 2003

An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s worth it. There’s something called a ‘walking upstairs policy’, which means that no one is allowed to walk upstairs unless they are accompanied by a member of staff. I had arrived before Barbara, who was made to wait until someone could escort her up to join me, while I waited. A gobbledyspeak-trained comis brought some salty thingies to try ‘while you’re wasting your time’. For all the hifalutin palaver about the ‘chef’s inspiration for the day’, most of the sludge-coloured food tasted as you’d imagine the froth around horses’ mouths would. But the room is rather wonderful and weirdly, at those astronomic — note the missing ‘g’ — prices, was almost full.

I see that the telephone directory, the Yellow Pages, has made the FTSE-100 since it was floated on the stock market earlier this week. I know that it is supposed to be quite simply the most wonderful thing, but does anybody actually still use the Yellow Pages? Great loads of them, in their new black mackintoshes, are delivered to the lobby of my block of flats with astonishing frequency. We all step around them gingerly for weeks, until in exasperation someone dumps the whole lot into a skip.

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Tom Bower

Labour is destroying London’s nightlife

In case one ever doubted it, Bill Clinton proved, with his unexpected appearance at Lyn De Rothschild’s reception for his wife, Hillary, that he certainly does have enormous presence. He reminds me of Mae West’s wisecrack: ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’ Several of the girls who were introduced to him said how much they felt that he enjoyed the pleasure of their company.