The Spectator’s notes: Diana’s bed, Boris’s dirty trick and Prince Philip’s mystery tie

On Friday night, I went to Althorp, childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales, to speak at its literary festival. My first duty was to appear on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions? in a tent there. It was 30 years to the month that I had first been on the programme. Then it was at Uppingham School, presented by David Jacobs, and the panel included Roy Hattersley and Esther Rantzen. This time, it was presented by Jonathan Dimbleby, and the panel was George Galloway, Nigel Evans (the Tory MP who did not rape any men), and a beautiful woman called Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. She was nine years old when I put in my first appearance. In all that time, the show has changed very little. It has retained its courteous, interested audiences and the camaraderie that comes from being in a town hall/stately home/local school rather than a London studio. From a panellist’s point of view, it is fun. The great difference lies in the subjects. Thirty years ago, it was Thatcherism (1984 was the year of Scargill’s miners’ strike). Now it is all about versions of the national question — Europe, immigration and the Islamist subversion of our culture.

Before the show, I was taken to my quarters, a huge, dark affair in the middle of the house called the Princess of Wales room. The bed canopy was so high it was cloud-capt. The wardrobes were so far off the ground that wooden poles were provided to hoist one’s clothes on coat-hangers to their distant hooks. In the room was a present, a book by our host, Lord Spencer, about the house. ‘Althorp,’ he concludes, ‘is, to me, the essence of Englishness. This is particularly so in its contradictions.’ I thought of this as our panel debated the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham schools and the nature of ‘British values’, and George Galloway ranted beguilingly (if that is not too oxymoronic) about the wickedness of the West.