John McEntee — ‘the Chancer from Cavan’, as he bills himself — has enjoyed a long career as a gossip columnist on various national newspapers. Gossip is thirsty work, and in the anecdotes that comprise the bulk of his memoirs he is almost invariably ‘well-refreshed’. That can also be dangerous.
He recalls, for example, attempting to introduce himself to Eve Pollard, who was then editor of the Sunday Mirror, in the bar of the Grand Hotel at the 1989 Labour party conference in Brighton. Pollard was talking at the time to Bruce Anderson, who told him, ‘Fuck off, potato head.’ McEntee responded by whipping off Anderson’s spectacles, and Anderson took a blind swing at him, which landed on Pollard’s bosom. This woke up Anthony Bevins, the political editor of the Independent, who threw a punch at Anderson which also landed on Pollard’s bosom, and began a mêlée involving Keith Waterhouse and a drunken Alastair Campbell, who had until then been playing the bagpipes.
Later, when McEntee wrote about the incident in the Oldie, ‘Brucie’, as he calls Anderson, denied having called him ‘potato head’: ‘I called you a famine dodger.’ This is a helpful clarification, but the story, though quite funny, is still not altogether convincing. Nor are many of his other stories, most of which are not remotely funny.
McEntee claims to have been a friend of the actor Richard Harris, who told him in an interview for the Irish Press that he had sent his teenage son to rehab, but asked him to keep it off the record. McEntee agreed, then sold the information to the Daily Star for £30. Harris sued, and in court McEntee made, as he remembers it, ‘a shifty and unconvincing witness’, which has the ring of truth.
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