Love spesh: Is it The Spectator's Jeremy Clarke + Farah 'the bird' Damji?

Farah Damji

I may have a heart of flint yet even I, in the right circumstances, can turn into a channel for the late Dame Barbara Cartland and bat my false, matted eyelashes while posing as a fan of romantic nougat.

I turn to the Spectator's riveting Low Life column in the latest issue and learn that its author Jeremy Clarke - described as 'The Evelyn Waugh de nos jours' - is the proud owner of a 'bird' whom he takes to a pub after what sounds like an evening at an art class. He tells us that the art teacher may very well fancy his bird as booze is knocked back. The sculptor, too, has designs on her contours. Then someone identified as the mother-in-law asks whom the bird is with. To which the bird replies, 'testily': ‘No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!’

Is it a bird?

Who could this bird be? Given her vocal feistiness, Janet Street-Porter? Dame Shirley Porter? Perhaps even Clarissa Dickson Wright?

Or could it be one Farah Damji? - described by the Evening Standard as 'London's most dangerous woman?' Well, it's not beyond the realms of possibility. Both Jeremy and Farah are highly attractive persons free at the point of delivery and of proven fertility. Both exhibit a cosmopolitan tolerance of some of life's hardier annuals while nonetheless flouncing about in rarefied atmospheres - the Spectator's in Jeremy's case.

Jeremy Clarke

It is distressing then to learn that when she attempted to defend her love in the last 24 hours, by posting a comment below his Low Life column in response to my foul abuse, she was censored! I believe the comment has now been restored - but we can't have the home of free speech (ie the Speccie) nursed along by nannies or people better off running sex clinics (reception).

But whatever the truth of the matter, I extend my best wishes to lovebirds everywhere. Just remember: the fun is always in making up, you sweety-tweeties!

Susan Hill: The-willies queen is missing in blogging action

Susan Hill

The writer Susan Hill hasn't blogged at the Spectator since February - this observation was made in a comment to my review of Duncan Fallowell's new travel book, How to Disappear. What could the matter be? I visited the Speccie site where a few of her commenters are grumbling among themselves over her non-appearance. The word 'twat' gets used - how common.

A Hill loyalist has helpfully left the comment: 'Susan is one of the judges for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, and according to her posts on Twitter over the past couple of days, is working on the proofs of her latest novel, starting a new book and making notes for a collection of short stories. It's hardly surprising that she's not been blogging. Let's hope she'll be back soon.'

The key words here are 'according to her posts on Twitter...' She has time to tweet but not to blog. The truth is Susan is always busy so far as I can tell, always up to her neck in deadlines, celebrity visits to pubs and cavorting about in fashionable beauteous rusticity. And tweeting. She's always writing books, publishing books, writing about books: she is a production line, a sausage factory of hauntings hokum for lovers of the-willies. None of this has ever stopped her from churning out another batch of finely-tuned opinions for her various blogs over the years.

Obviously she has fallen out with the magazine. I hope no one's bitter.

(Do read Duncan's book which describes his stay at her Gloucestershire home while working on a book: oddly, she declined to eat with him though was otherwise friendly.)

Andrew Neil parties with the stars on election night!

Most ghastly fun on election night was Andrew Neil's celebrity Thames barge party. Whenever Jeremy Paxman drawled himself into bored paralysis in the BBC studio - where a hereditary Dimbleby anchor modelled Dame Barbara Cartland's mortuary makeup - we cut pierside and to Andrew's game attempt to cross Nicky Haslam with Capt Bligh.

Beyond Andrew's well-chronicled adoration of stars it was hard to see what his Debrett's People of Today-approved liggers added to the occasion, but at least the likes of Bill Wyman kept him happy. We wouldn't want the chairman of the rightwing Spectator publishing company not to feel indulged.

There was Bruce Forsyth. Bereft of a gameshow crowd of dentured chucklers, he twirled to face the party-gatherers behind him and cried, "Nice to see you ..." etc, to indifferent response. The former Sunday Times editor didn't know where to look. Standing by Bruce's side was Sir Ben Kingsley (or "Sirben" as he's better known to luvvies) who irrelevantly paid tribute to democracy in a poorer part of the world. Neil looked unengaged (Gemini!), backed away a bit... [cut to studio!].

Private Eye fans will have welcomed the sight of Ian Hislop positioned within slapping distance of our host. For years the magazine has repeatedly published a photo of a vested Andrew partying with some gorgeous gal (not Pamella Bordes!), wilfully misspelt his name (Neill) and teased his thatch ("Brillo"). But for the TV cameras they were buddies - isn't that always the case with slebs? Ian seemed put out by the Lib Dem collapse which gave Andrew an opportunity to josh him as a commie bastard, or something.

Oh, revenge handbags at the next starry do!

Earlier, Andrew had talked with Ian's other mortal foe, Piers Morgan. It was a shocking exchange. Piers sounded intelligent and faintly socialist! He looked slimmer than I recall! Next to him was Mariella Whatsup who bemoaned the influence of markets on democracy; and did I see Jane Moore of The Sun there?, sounding a lot less enamoured of the Tories than in her column. I guess she has to keep Rebekah happy.

Later Andrew invited Martin Amis to bring some "literary sense" to the election. Mart tried but it's hard to think amid canapés. And then I noticed on Twitter that Guardian writer Jemima Kiss thought Andrew "needs a better colourist. Sheesh."

Yes, to start with.

And now for the volcanic ash denialists

You can hear the murmurs already. Where's the research, the evidence, that Europe had to close down its air space all because of some piffling volcano in Iceland? An Italian on Radio 4's Today this morning blustered against the "theoretical models" that caused airports and airlines to shut up shop. Told that a Met Office plane had encountered  dangerous levels of ash, he said he knew nothing of it. So let's ignore it?

Any minute now Andrew Neil will be galvanising the idiotic Spectator kids to cast doubt on the existence of the volcanic ash or its destructive effect.

These self-described "contrarians" will also be doubling as the climate change denialists who've gone quiet since the scientists at East Anglia University were cleared of misrepresenting research on global temperatures.  It's curious how the Church of Science has bred a new generation of secular flock uninterested in objective evidence. You can see in motion how religions spark to life.

Is The Spectator a racist magazine?

I only ask because according to The Spectator, blogging is just a "conversational medium". So do please converse. The magazine mounted this defence of its blogger Rod Liddle to the Press Complaints Commission after he wrote that the "overwhelming majority" of violent crime in London was carried out by young African-Caribbean men. The Spectator lost, diddums. The magazine was unable to back Liddle's claim factually. NB: They did not retract the claim.

One assumes Liddle's comment was nodded through by editors sympathetic to the viewpoint. One assumes there are no young African-Caribbean men on the editorial staff to rein in the Empire-nostalgic Tory young Turks dreaming of an Etonian Westminster.

This is a particularly embarrassing outcome for the publication's immature editor, Andrew Neil's mini-me bitch, Fraser Nelson, who also whores his right-wing slob views for the News of the World. Only last year he ran a Spectator coverline which suggested racism in Britain is sooooo not very prevalent any more (Sample from body copy: "The less racist Britain is, the more popular this racist party [BNP] becomes.") Oops. Less racist?

Meanwhile, the new owner of the Independent, Alexander Lebedev owes me, Suzanne Moore and others for dissuading him from making Liddle the paper's editor. We're all heart.

Susan Hill gets it all wrong on Katie Price and the lower orders

Susan Hill

Former Arcatiste Susan Hill (famed novelist, publisher, playwright, opinionist spewer of words) now writes a blog for The Spectator, the magazine that's hosting an Aids-denialist movie screening on Oct 28 - and my thanks to the loyal, all-weather Arcastiste who brought the blog to my attention. I did say elsewhere that I would not bother to read it, but being a double Gemini I succumbed to curiosity and had a look. Oh dear.

Susan's latest post is a nattery onslaught on ghost written celebrity novels such as those by Katie Price (aka Jordan). In Mail-style fulminant mode she writes of these books: "To pretend to pen a novel, to appear and sign the book for long queues of people and never to acknowledge the ‘real’ author, is simple deceit and the many people who buy a novel believing that it really was written by Jordan or Katie Price, are being cynically manipulated."

I don't think so, dearie. If Susan did her homework, instead of wallowing in upper middleclass oblivion of lower-order cultural realities - a condition encouraged by the infantile, belle epoque mindset of the Spectator - she would know it's no secret that Katie is not the author of the novels that bear her name. As Katie herself said in a Mail interview - among others! - last year to push Angel Uncovered: "I'm not going to sit here and say I write it word by word because I'd be lying. I actually say how I want the story and that's how it happens." Her non-authorship is a truth universally acknowledged. Her books are brand-stamped productions and promoted as such.

I bet Susan a modest £50 - to be donated to an Aids charity - that she will not find one Katie Price fan chosen at random who imagines Katie has written any of her books. Susan would do better to get back to writing a properly earthed indie blog and not try to pander to the delusional and out-of-touch soaks of the Spectator readership.

On other matters, I've always been fascinated by spiders ...

Farah Damji: Try Me: Just give this princess a cross

A review

There are many reasons why the journalist and convicted fraudster Farah Damji won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

For me, there’s a very personal one. In Arcatiland she was the first herald of Michael Jackson’s death. She emailed the news to a posting here and I said to myself: Oh no, is she making this up? Then Sky confirmed it later. Proustian memory has now locked Damji and Jacko together over an eternal keyboard late one summer night.

And the infamous two do have one big thing in common: both, for different reasons, move us to ask of their lives - what am I to believe?

This is the question many readers will ask as they rocket through Damji’s enthralling autobiography Try Me. Critics expecting a string of self-serving excuses written in throwaway tabloidese will be disconcerted. As a piece of writing Try Me is a nuanced, self-punishing, sometimes lyrical, always compelling and an all-too-revealing performance. It's a beaut.

What’s she like? Put simply, if you gave this girl a life-size cross she’d probably have herself nailed to it just to see how it feels. That’s the kind of person who emerges from these pages.

Try Me seethes at times with a fury that’s not always easy to understand. “My temper was like a genie which possessed me…” she writes. If the heavy pall of fraud convictions, prison spells and recent criminality hangs low over her then this book may serve some kind of purpose in helping to get into the head of the inscrutable, “Chanel-clad” rich girl-socialite-magazine editor-brothel madam-fashion designer who simply can’t keep out of trouble.

Farah Damji was born in Uganda in 1966 to South Asian parents. She thinks her mother loved the extended family more than her own kids while her wealthy father’s side “were Dallas-like in their aspirations and the depths of their deviancy” with one or two involved in “semi-criminal shenanigans.” Damji haters will make much of that.

Via Tramp’s, Annabel’s and other London glory spots she soared into adulthood. At 21 she drank a whole bottle of gin just to see what would happen (think of the cross) and in New York sex, too, got the cross treatment - “I fucked frenetically for a place in the fornicators’ Hall of Fame.” In the Big Apple, she soon gravitated towards the sleb-serving glitz-dreck where nightclub managers could fix meets between the Pope and Monegasque royalty, and drugs and whoring bankrolled a world glammed up by crime movies. A collision with law enforcers was inevitable.

“Life was a game I played. I made up or changed the rules as I went along,” she writes. Later she regularly stole cash from a lover - “I never felt bad about stealing from him, it was payback in the transactional game of our relationship.” “Game” is a motif Damji word.

“Should I tell you I am a thief, that I will steal your soul?” she teases the reader. “I took people and things, the way I’m taking you now, with my long brown fingers, with the Pied Piper’s tune of distance and dreams. You know all about me. Yet still you follow.” Is this book another game?

Back in the Cool Britannia of the Noughties, Damji launches the short-lived magazine Indobrit and is immersed in controversies and the London media scene: two major affairs with married media men add to the profile. The infamy. And the in-for-me.

Then a wonderful chapter on India offers respite and a clue to her true gifts: as an explorer and observer. “India is about erasing, taking away preconceptions,” she writes. “Just the stark juxtaposition of wealth and scarcity – the tuk-tuk ride from Malabar Hill mansions to the slum dog hovels, though a short one, is hard to grasp.”

The final part of the book is a depressing litany of cops and frauds and did-she-didn’t-shes?, culminating in a long jail term. Now she has time to outline Try Me and discover Kabbalah but still she jumps prison leave and while on the run writes a blog - a first of a kind that tickles the media. The papers love it because she's an errant princess of sorts, dirty Diana-lite, but one who eats, not kisses, frogs.

I could have lived without the love affairs with the named marrieds - I’m only thinking of their aggrieved wives - and I think Damji has turned many of her crimes into abstractions so that she has lost sight of those she has harmed: you won’t find a big unambiguous sorry. Or, I didn’t find it.

Instead, you’ll encounter a gifted, highly intelligent woman observing herself in mirrors, scrutinising the different perspectives amorally, no matter the light or unflattering murk. Try Me is a trove of insights on types and experiences well outside Acacia Avenue so that reading it is an adventure in itself. A game, even.

And she's not the first princess of darkness who can write like an angel.

Try Me, click here to buy.

(For another perspective on Try Me, read the New Statesman review)

Try Me, the Spectator and the power of unseen friends

I see the Spectator hoped to run a review of Farah Damji's Try Me but was thwarted by the bonds of friendship which so frequently decide what (and how what) gets reviewed in our largely (still!) Oxbridge press.

I am printing two letters (the latter edited to save blushes) between the magazine's literary editor Mark Amory and the press director of the company credited with publishing Try Me, Sophie Cooke. In this instance I think the magazine has behaved entirely honourably: it wasn't interested in the book, then became interested because someone Amory knew said he wanted to review the title. The reviewer manqué then cried off, thinking of Answered Prayers and the horrors of social ostracism, no doubt. Amory frankly and refreshingly reveals all. Do you see the sneery smile on Madame Arcati's face?

Dear Mark,
I hope you are well. I am just following up to see if you had a chance to look at the press release I sent you about Farah Damji’s book, Try Me, and if so, if you are at all interested in doing something with it? Many thanks,
Sophie Cooke
Press Director
The Ark Press

Dear Sophie,
I am sorry I have mucked you about. I did not plan to do ‘Try Me’ then someone asked specially to do it, you decently sent me a copy and now he says he can’t because it is rude about dear friends. Why not defend them, I say but he is immoveable. Sorry.
Yours,
Mark

Other examples of missing book reviews in our national press would be most welcome.

Sploshing - Speccie is the place to be

Clive Davis - the Spectator blogger, inter alia - asked me recently to explain sploshing, so I did. He writes to acknowledge my efforts ...

"Wot me, cerebral, Madame A? You'll have to come up and view my collection of Norman Wisdom DVDs one of these evenings.

"If I was based at the Speccie office, I'd probably be better informed about sploshing and its many spin-offs. Ah well... "

Joan Collins: She gave neck skin for a lampshade?

Naughty Lavinia writes, in rapid response to my posting below:

"Is Joan Collins still alive? I was at dear old Zazou de Madrazo Fortuny's villa last week, on that shadowy bit of Cap Ferrat, and Zazou said she had a small lampshade made from the trimmings of Joan Collins's neck. I thought she was joking but Zazou said no, the actress had donated it to the Surrealist Jumble Sale in aid of the roof of St Paul's Monte Carlo. They did quite well apparently and the roof is now in excellent condition. Must go next time in down there. Haven't been on my knees once this year."

Madame Arcati - drowning in honours

My thanks to the Spectator blogger Clive Davis for including Madame Arcati in a list of his favourite top 20 blogs. I think it's for Iain Dale's blogging guide, or something - click here for details. First I've heard of it. For Clive's list click here, August 15.

Joan Collins, The Spectator and ... Dubravka Ugrešić

The Spectator makes a gift of itself to me and I'm not entirely sure why. An accompanying letter with the free copy thanks me for my generosity - apparently I funded over 400 subscriptions in its Spectator for Schools scheme last year - which is news to me but I'm always happy to take the credit. However, the magazine informs me that there are still 400 schools that wanted a sub but didn't get it - presumably that, too, is down to me. The law of karma is a relentless one, n'est-ce pas?

I open the magazine and fate takes me immediately to Joan Collins' Riviera Notebook - goodness knows what your average school child would make of this. In one entry she finds herself in a St Tropez "dive" where a jeroboam of Cristal may set you back €10,000 - think of the number of Spectator subscriptions that would bankroll. She lunches with "witty" Rupert Everett who suggests she consider whoring herself out to Coronation Street while another time she dons a Muslim-style burka to escape the attention of paparazzi. Alas, "billowing folds of black schmutter became caught between my legs," she records.

Collins has been an improbable Spectator sweet-heart since Boris Johnson edited the rag, and I'm glad successor Matthew d'Ancona has retained her. She is, as Gore Vidal says of her, funny. She also writes very well - wittily and pellucidly. Critics wonder aloud about the actual parentage of her prose - imagining some bearded scholar ventriloquist scripting her journalism - but I think not. Her use of certain words - such as "dive" for a five-star louche venue - is characteristic of her conversation; and in person she easily segues from faintly outrageous detail of her spending and social habits to highly political and eloquent attacks on her latest hate targets, as she does in the Spectator. She's as camp as camp can be. She is the very antithesis of Linda Evans.

Collins' reinvention as a quasi-literary-lite darling of the British right triggers a recollection of someone you probably won't have heard of, the Yugoslavian/Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić. Four years ago she brought out a marvellous book of essays on writers and writing called Thank You for Not Reading. Ugrešić has never quite got over the burgeoning impurity of British literary life - the dominance of celebrity, hype, marketing, etc, over the written word. This thought cystallised when in the mid-'90s she attended a London Book Fair that was opened by ... Joan Collins. The star appeared "dressed like a quotation: in a little pink Chanel suit, with a pink pillbox hat on her head and a coquettish veil over her eyes ... What does all this have to do with literature?" asks Ugrešić.

I should point out that Thank You For Not Reading is very funny, very sharp, in places. It's not the work of a dreary grey-pube lost in academe. Ugrešić's book registers the cultural shock of a serious eastern European aesthetic colliding with the Tesco-soul of our own bright Blighty.

Yet here we are now, with Joan Collins making a coverline on the Spectator, honoured presence in all the salons - literary, hair and beauty. I'm not sure Ugrešić would be impressed. But I may yet fund Spectator subscriptions for those other 400 schools.

Sploshing! - Spectator expresses an interest

The Spectator's otherwise cerebral and tasteful blogger Clive Davis asks Madame Arcati what is "sploshing" - he is under the impression that I would know about such things. If I do, then it is thanks in part to the BBC's Graham Norton Show which recently ran an item on sploshing, featuring a load of tarts covering themselves (and some near-nude mug male from the audience) in glutinous Heinz beans and other edibles. And that's basically sploshing. For more on this sexually arousing activity, visit the Splosh! website - full of family fun. Anything else I can do to widen the experience of Spectator contributors? ...

This DVD cover is reproduced here without permission and those who would threaten suit for copyright breach are welcome to dip themselves in treacle - at my expense, natch.