Diary – 3 October 2009

A week to enjoy the autumn sunshine by the sea. Gluttony is no longer fashionable but what better way to celebrate my birthday on Monday than to spend a few hours at the Royal Native Oyster restaurant in Whitstable? Sitting by the Kent beach, I confess to consuming 24 oysters, a crab, a lobster, two bottles of Pouilly Fumé, a plum crumble and Irish coffee. Thankfully my wife was more modest. All her entreaties for restraint were answered by my description of Samuel Pepys’s vastly superior daily consumption as described in Claire Tomalin’s wonderful biography. Inevitably, I later collapsed on the shingle rereading that day’s lead entry in the Times’s ‘Happy Birthday’ column. ‘I can’t believe you’re writing about my birthday and not Brigitte Bardot’s,’ I had told Russell Twisk the previous week at the Garrick. Naturally, I was thrilled, more so when I returned home and read a congratulatory email from a famous friend lamenting, ‘yours had a photo, which is more than I’ve ever achieved.’

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Tom Bower

Labour is destroying London’s nightlife

One-upmanship was also the issue in sunny Brighton on Tuesday. ‘The Tory toffs,’ confided a senior minister walking by the sea, ‘are what Gordon really hates. Eleven old Etonians on the front bench, that’s what it’s all about.’ His exaggeration echoes Brown’s war against David Cameron’s privileged background, reflecting a career built on anti-English class warfare. Brown’s successful creation of New Labour depended on assiduously camouflaging his prejudices. Now, his pretence has been virtually abandoned. Readers of my unauthorised biography of the prime minister, published to critical scorn exactly five years ago, will not be surprised. But in 2004, political wonks inhabiting the Westminster village were unaware of Brown’s deep-rooted duplicity. Few realised how Brown’s rise to power across Whitehall depended on his saying one thing but doing the exact opposite.