Diary – 29 March 2003

Breakfast with Frost (the actual breakfast, not the programme which precedes it) is usually a rather jolly affair. Uniquely in today’s cost-conscious BBC – where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a plastic cup of some thin brown liquid called ‘coffee’ and a dusty artefact described as a ‘bun’ – Sir David’s star status entitles him, J.-Lo. style, to accountant-mocking extravagances. Like, for example, the Great British Breakfast Fry-Up, complete with fine napery and waitresses; amazingly, for the sternly non-smoking BBC, heretical ashtrays are scattered everywhere. Sir David is partial to a breakfast cigar or two, which allows us lesser mortals to indulge in a quick drag on a fag once the great man has lit up. You often share the Frost fry-up with guests whose presence alongside your eggs, bacon and black pudding can be a mite disconcerting if you’ve recently insulted them in print or on air. One Sunday I forked uneasily through the scrambled eggs next to a dour-faced Andy Gilchrist of the FBU, whom I’d just described as a donkey – as in ‘lions-led-by-donkeys’ – and Iain Duncan Smith, whom I’d equally recently described as someone whose very presence ‘took the oxygen out of the air’. Must be something in the Frost fry-up which acts as a bromide: we’re all extraordinarily nice to each other.

Last Sunday wasn’t, for once, particularly jolly. No smoking, for a start: to my horror, our host did not light up his usual cigar. At first I assumed that, as one of the guests was the American ambassador, David might have abstained, perhaps on the diplomatic grounds that, while most Americans thoroughly applaud the death penalty, they regard us smokers as part of the Axis of Evil – especially those who smoke US-embargoed Cuban cigars. In fact, to his mild fury, David had simply run out of the things.