Help! I haven’t been groped
But some well-known men have certainly tried it on
I have become a grave disappointment to the editor of this magazine. Despite a lifetime careering around newspaper offices, Westminster, television studios, several visits to 10 Downing Street and even – oh, the shame – a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, who wanted to get his hands on The Weakest Link, my incidents of Groper-gate are practically zero.
Worse still, younger members of the sisterhood have now pretty well disowned me.
This is since I sat in a BBC radio car in my drive in Gloucestershire, being interviewed for the Today programme. Unfortunately, I sighed and giggled when one of the two female guests in the studio was explaining how inappropriate it was for a male barrister to have described her as stunning.
I didn’t actually say so but, if the truth were told, I have been known to perk up considerably when described thus.
More seriously, I believe that my generation paved the way and lifted the barriers for younger generations of women. Yet, puzzlingly, we failed to pass on our fighting spirit and natural sense of the absurd.
To save face, I do have a handful of examples of indecent proposals.
At a Labour Party conference in Brighton, I walked into breakfast and was hailed by a man who had been chief policy advisor to two prime ministers.
I joined him and we chatted agreeably like seasoned conference attenders while making our way through a full English.
Then, as I gathered my belongings and made to leave, he leaned over and whispered, ‘Shall we go up to my bedroom and read the Guardian together?’
I would like to say I responded with a withering putdown. But I was too busy looking at him with a mixture of pity and contempt. Never mind, it illustrates, although it is hardly necessary, that you can become a member of the House of Lords, while simultaneously being a complete tosser.
My second, I have always marked up as ‘highly commended’.
At the end of an official prime ministerial tour of Japan, China and India with Margaret Thatcher, we had one last stopover in Hong Kong. And an evening ahead at the governor’s mansion.
In the afternoon, the phone rang in my bedroom at the Hong Kong Hilton. It was my favourite travelling companion. He was at the time the Observer’s most gifted writer.
‘Anne,’ he said, ‘May I ask you a question?’ ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘Is there,’ he continued, ‘any chance that, between now and Heathrow, we might go to bed together?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But, Clive, now we’ve cleared that up, why not join me in my room for tea?’
The third, I can only describe as stylishly artful.
The late Alan Clark invited me to lunch at the Savoy Grill.
‘He’ll just want to get into your knickers,’ said my then husband. I disagreed.
However, as the waiter cleared away our Dover soles, Alan put his head to one side and said slowly, ‘Annie, why don’t we fast-track you into a safe Tory seat and then we can make you arts minister?’
I mean, what girl doesn’t like to be thought of as clever?
I’ve always considered there not to be much difference between a night in The London Clinic and a first-class BA flight to Los Angeles.
Both operate a policy of what Shirley Maclaine once described to me, in relation to being on a movie set, as ‘hurry to wait’.
You hang around for hours while nothing happens.
Lying in a bed in Devonshire Place recently, before being taken down to theatre for a tiny procedure, a flurry of nurses saw to my every need.
The tranquillity was only briefly broken by the arrival of a tall, slightly greying man in a black raincoat, carrying a rather chic, black briefcase.
‘You,’ I said, ‘must be the incredibly handsome anaesthetist.’ And he was.
Only later did it occur to me that, in the current climate, I might well have been out on my ear in my nightie and needing to grab a cab home.
Five of us had a lovely time at the Literary Leicester festival, as the panel invited to chat about our friendship with the late editor of The Oldie, Alexander Chancellor.
I had forgotten to mention in my last column that, along with Craig Brown, Alexander Waugh and Ferdy Mount, the author Geoffrey Wheatcroft joined us. I am so glad he did. It is more than thirty years ago but, as I gazed at him in his Garrick Club bow tie, it came to me that Wheatcroft is my one example of a man making an unexpected and clumsy lunge.
It was a sudden full-on grab and kiss on the lips by someone I hardly knew. Phew, I trust the editor will now be less dissatisfied.
The Oldie