Harvey weinstein

Oh, the glorious hypocrisy of it all – the dozens of actresses, UN goodwill ambassadors among them, who have come forward to make accusations against Harvey Weinstein – and yet whom said not a word between them when they were on the make and he was in a position to help them with their careers. I should say that if you are important and mature enough to serve as a UN ambassador you ought to be brave enough to report wrongdoing that is going on beneath your nose – and not wait until there is a bandwagon on which to leap. Worse, it turns out that in 2009 some of

Shortly after I began my working life, on the edge of the Westminster jungle, I landed a job with a ‘big beast’; an alpha male, in very much the same mould as Harvey Weinstein or Dominique Strauss-Kahn: silver-haired, heavy-set, charismatic. For a few months, he ignored me as I busied away researching stats. Then, during what should have been a routine working lunch, the searchlight of his wandering eye settled on me and out of the blue he declared passionate love: ‘Say you love me too. I just can’t live without you.’ This was both flattering and confusing. Why now? Why me? This famous man had a devoted wife and a small daughter and

I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very early in the morning and a woman’s voice told me that Harvey Weinstein wanted to speak to me. I was put on hold. I waited. And waited, and then waited some more. The reason I didn’t hang up was that I wanted to tell Harvey that if Queen Elizabeth had made me wait as long as he had I would have hung up. ‘But for you, Sir Harvey, I’ll wait an eternity.’ Well, Harvey is a Commander of the British Empire but I upgraded him a notch because, as strange

OK sports fans, what do Dame Vivien Duffield and Evelyn Waugh have in common? The answer is absolutely nothing, so why start 2016 with such a dumb question? Waugh was short and round and so is Vivien, but apart from weight and height there are no similarities. So why ask? Easy. I was reading about a dinner party Waugh gave for Clare Luce in November 1949 at the Hyde Park Hotel. He later wrote to Nancy Mitford complaining how much money the dinner had cost him, and how Clare — in my not so humble opinion the greatest woman of the 20th century — had failed to write a thank-you

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics who panned it know. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy in Brooklyn who told me, ‘You’re too pale for this neighbourhood.’ Go figure, as they say in that part of town. I’m always sad to leave the city, especially with the end of spring.

OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilised men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for Britain. I was convinced throughout the campaign that a certain testicular fortitude was missing on the part of the voters, and that David Cameron would be vacating No. 10. But, not for the first time, I was proved wrong. The only testicular fortitude missing was when Ed Balls lost his seat. So now we’ll have five more years of furious lefty hacks passing more wind than usual. There is nothing that angers

I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies and Eighties. Alas, it had to do with age, his and mine, 77 and 78 respectively. No, the man on the other end of the telephone did not ask me anything embarrassing. All he wanted to know was if women still come on to an oldie, or are they, as Jack Nicholson claims, a thing of the past. Well, for starters I do not believe that Nicholson is telling the truth, that he’s now alone and fears he will die alone because women have abandoned a sinking ship. He has

In the latest Spectator Life, our very own Taki told us: ‘I learned long ago that the harder it is to arrive at one’s destination, the better the resort.’ Apparently ‘Gstaad is one of the few ultra-chic winter playgrounds where big jets cannot land.’ Always up for a challenge, I decided that Switzerland’s finest mountain spot needed checking out. Bloody Mary-spilling turbulence, various coach ‘malfunctions’ and sideways snow aside, our resident High Lifer was proven wrong; ten hours after leaving London I arrived outside, as Taki finely puts it: ‘The Palace — a large chocolate cake of a castle-hotel, favoured by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.’ I was not alone; 200 of