Why can’t I go to parties like Naomi Wolf’s book launch? | 6 September 2012

I got an invitation the other day to attend the launch of some incendiary tract about Europe published by a think-tank. I get quite a few of these, especially stuff from what was once the Tory far right (and by ‘far’ I mean ‘far’ as in sort of Alpha Centauri, i.e. more easily measurable in light years than inches). I have nothing which constitutes a ‘life’, as such, so I go to one or two of these bashes every year — largely out of gratitude that anyone would ever invite me to anything. They’re always the same — suffocating room, unrefreshed by unchilled Pinot Grigio and some conference league canapés, usually involving spinach; over there in the corner a chap who is very very old and who I vaguely remember being dismissed from a Thatcher cabinet for letting slip to a reporter something which would not altogether accord with the views of Martin Luther King; dishevelled rodentine author with revolving eyes and bad breath, and a large northern man who manufactures meat pies, and who stumped up the money for the booklet, dumbly gladhanding everybody.