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.’
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