It was a large thickish card. ‘180th anniversary of the Spectator’, to be celebrated at the Churchill Hotel in elegant Portman Square. It looked to be an event not to miss and I’m quite partial to a little schmoozing from the ‘Right’ since it is from within my domain on the Left that I have been the most scourged. This has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but I conclude that the Left is not quite so left as it would like to pretend it is.
The traffic was horrendous, and like the maze of Theseus, each turn I took sadistically led me back via one-way streets to my start position. Thus have London streets been turned into a lunatic’s worst nightmare. Get it sorted Boris!
At last Portman Square. I am guided in with beaming smiles and my black Beetle is even valet parked. I walk in and pose obligingly for the archive photographers. I then walk into a gigantic room, which is the inner sanctum, the hive of The Establishment.
Facing me is an incredible mêlée of people chattering furiously, gripping flutes of champagne. I sidle over to the side of the room and idly survey a tempting banquet of snacks and just at that moment a very pleasant old acquaintance approaches and pours unguents into my ear, with praises of a modest play of mine. We recall those heady days when I put on a play in the West End each year. From nowhere an attractive young woman joins us whom he introduces as an underground journalist. She apparently insinuates herself into risky situations posing as an interested party. She ‘shyly’ confesses that she knows hardly anyone in the room. This is in itself a challenge to a male not only to redeem the situation but to introduce her to everybody and anybody in that august collection. So now that I have a cause, my ego is calibrated up a few notches and we plough through the room searching out, through the yakking Tory flesh, the celebrated and illustrious.
Lo and behold, surfacing briefly above the sea of faces is the unmistakable patrician head of Oz’s greatest export, Barry Humphries, elegantly attired in a tailored double-breasted suit. Barry’s wit has the qualities of those alien raptors whose acidic effusion reduces brave men to thick syrup. Yet, I feel I can call him a friend since we caught up with each other when I did my one-man show in Oz about 12 years ago. So he pats my head with fond recollections of my work and I introduce him to the journalist, but soon the tide divides us up again.
That was a lucky ‘strike’ but I must try to control that crude feeling rising like nausea, which is to impress my new friend. She pulls me into the champagne banquet for some refills and once replenished we once more punt into the maelstrom. There’s Michael Winner looking really dapper in his new slimline body and we splutter a few bits of gossip and what we were up to. Now I see the bushy hair of the Homer of the Jewish world, Howard Jacobson. With his thick grey hair and fulsome beard he would be central casting’s idea of an old testament prophet, if he were not already a prolific writer and formidable ping-pong player who once thrashed me, thus proving, if not shoving down my throat, that he is as adept with bat and ball as with pen and paper.
I seize a strangely exotic purple cocktail and yes, it flows down easily and who do I see in the distance striding the room while the crowd melts before him. Ah, this is an eight-point stag and really, I just want to meet him, since I have admired him greatly since he made one of the most outstanding speeches to the nation that I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.
He seems to float through the room surrounded by a small gaggle of satellites that are eagerly feeding on the little verbal tit-bits he throws out. He looks a model of composure, cool, elegant and relaxed and is accompanied by his lovely wife, no doubt freshly exhilarated after his weekly thrashing of Gordon Brown’s ample backside.
I must complete my evening by speaking to him. But not so easily and not so enthusiastically as I have with the others whom I did at least have some claim to, no matter how slender that may be thought to be. I’d like merely to congratulate him on that speech since it was a veritable sermon on the mount and imbued with a certain ‘messianic’ fervour.
I stride boldly across the room, placing my carcass almost in his line of vision. I introduce myself — ‘I am Steven B...’, but he cuts me off and gallantly fibs, ‘Of course I know who you are.’ Oh, how charming he is... I then deliver my oratorio briefly summing up my admiration for that now famous speech and how as an actor I could admire it all the more for the delivery. He seemed to accept my slightly oily hyperboles with gracious charm and confessed to me that at one time during his turbulent youth he had even entertained the idea of trying the acting profession.
Pride now puffed itself into my cheeks. Mr Cameron even had the manners to enquire what I was up to. Fortunately this time I had something to say. ‘I have just directed the stage version of the famous movie On the Waterfront. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I remember it well... and how good James Dean was.’ Of course I couldn’t correct his little error since Brando and Dean were buds of the same tree so to speak, so his mistake was perfectly natural. We smiled at the thought of the film and parted with a manly handshake. I felt as if champagne was fizzing through my veins as I strode back eager to see the look of beaming admiration in the eyes of my new young friend, the ‘undercover’ journalist.
She had gone. Just disappeared into the throng. Where did she go and why, at my moment of glory? After all she was, in a sense, the springboard whence I entered into the fray. However, even if she was the stimulus to free me from my wallflower habit, I was glad to meet old friends and even make a new one who will be, barring accidents, the next prime minister of this country.
Now I decide to leave. I leave a great sea of white faces, grinning, smiling and still chattering furiously. I hand in my ticket and my car is restored to me. ‘Nice evening sir?’ Oh yes, excellent!
© Steven Berkoff