SIRROY’S STILL GOING STRONG... ASHISOWN GREATEST ADMIRER
Even the poor old Dean of St Paul’s doesn’t come up to scratch: ‘a bit of a disappointment, somewhat dull in fact’.
Attending the wedding of William and Kate in 2011, Sir Roy sniffs that the Duke of York’s daughters ‘are desperately in need of fashion counselling’, while ‘the prize for the most inappropriately dressed woman from where I was sitting went to Mrs Bercow, whose plunging neckline suggested that she’d mistaken the occasion’. But he is equally happy to abuse those who will never be household names. Sitting next to a Mrs Durrant at a large dinner, he is upset by the fact that she does not know who he is. After she has described herself as ‘a corporate wife’, he writes in his diary: ‘Yes, of the most boring variety.’
For all his talk of growing old gracefully, age has not dimmed his vanity, nor his sense of competition.
Much of the book is spent extolling the glories of his grand garden in Herefordshire, which the similarly waspish Hardy Amies once described as ‘Mr Pooter goes to Versailles’. Sir Roy is convinced that the National Trust should take it on, and is furious when it turns down his offer – ‘a horribly wrong decision based on the malice and envy of a few’. For him it knocks spots off other, more famous gardens. ‘Visitors heap praise on it, saying again and again, “Better than Highgrove.”’
His get-up-and-go in old age is admirable. He learns to bicycle for the first time in his 70s, and is always coming up with absurd new media projects, like ‘a fun series in which I “educate” someone. That started with the idea that I should relive the Grand Tour with Russell Brand’.
One or two of them even get made. In 2008 he hosts a reality TV show called The Diets That Time Forgot, in which ‘nine fatties’ are put on a diet and exercise regime from the 1860s, and he acts as their bossy supervisor. Inevitably, the contestants fall short of his own high standards. ‘Virtually none of them had any idea of table manners… Most didn’t know how to hold a knife and fork.’
Sir Roy emerges as his own best friend, always at hand to shower himself with praise. ‘I was on top form,’ he notes after appearing on Radio 4’s Midweek. ‘I sat down to a huge wave of applause,’ he reports, after a brief after-dinner speech. So let’s all praise these diaries. After all, if we don’t, then he most surely will.