My lunch with the Queen

None of this would have happened had I accepted my neighbour’s invitation to dine with a Swiss billionaire banker, or bb. (Sorry, Real life.) He’s an old friend, the bb, and untypically Swiss. He boozes, schnoofs, and chases women, or Afabs, as the absurd youth of today call them. Booze, alas, now goes to my head, and as the song says, it lingers like a haunting refrain for at least a couple of days. I had kick boxing early the next day so I chose to watch the 1949 classic, Sands of Iwo Jima, and snub the Swiss bb.

The film was made in 1949 and stars the greatest of them all, John Wayne, luckily no longer with us to see what his beloved America has turned into. The movie is very patriotic and all that, gung-ho Marines charging up Mount Suribachi, but it gives absolutely no acknowledgment to the Japanese soldiers who were shelled from air and sea for months on end and died defending to a man what they considered to be sacred Japanese soil. I suppose that back in 1949 Pearl Harbor, where a few thousand sailors died, was still raw, but 130,000 incinerated women and children in Tokyo, courtesy of Curtis LeMay’s bombing campaign, and 200,000 dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t count. The film doesn’t show a scintilla of the bravery of the Japanese defenders dying for a grubby landscape far from home.

Well, Japan, Hungary and Poland are the only three countries I respect nowadays. The rest are ruled by brutality, as in Africa, or, in the case of a dehumanised Europe and America, by Silicon Valley freaks. I was expounding about this while lunching with Boris – no, not the blond one, but an Aiglon alumnus who had attended that good school with my daughter – when a sneering, hysterically intemperate woman looking like a spurned groupie took umbrage at what I was saying. I’d never seen her before and she was either a Brit putting on an American accent or an American playing the Brit. Had I not stayed home and seen the film, I would not have been expounding the martial virtues of Bushido and the nutcase would not have taken umbrage. I stayed calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean, which at least flap their flippers to express emotion, but the unknown woman insisted that I was a Neanderthal. I consider that a great compliment, and in view of the fact that the pest was a female, I continued my conversation as if nothing had happened.

It is an amazing thing: a private conversation at a restaurant, sotto voce to boot, can result in some crazy lefty butting in and trying to have her five seconds of attention. Perhaps it was my choice of Margaret Court, as opposed to the bullying, self-entitled and graceless Serena Williams, as the greatest ever in tennis that set her off. Or was it when I said that BLM is the greatest financial scam in America? After she was escorted off the premises, my friend and I wondered what has happened to this world of ours, supposedly a civilised one, when you cannot even state an opinion without some phoney butting in and calling you a fascist.

A teacher is jailed in Ireland after refusing to use trans pronouns; that Paris of Troy lookalike Ian Hislop, including his quadruple chins, grossly insults Boris Johnson on the air; the Vogue editor complains he can’t hail a cab because of his skin colour; and Chips Channon’s diaries finally prove that every Tory who ever lived was gay. It’s nice to be back in London again.

But then the Queen dies and the loss puts everything into perspective. I happened to be at the Spectator offices when the news came in, so William Moore, Freddy Gray and I proceeded to drown our sorrows. The wine affected me more than Will or Freddy. And it brought back the precious memory of February 1952, at boarding school in America, when Reverend Gould, at breakfast prayer, announced the death of George VI, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II. And here I was at the Spectator offices when that great monarch’s life ebbed.

Exactly 22 years ago, I happened to be invited to Highgrove for a lunch the now King gave for King Constantine of Greece. It was the first time the present Queen Consort was acting as hostess, and she greeted me with a knowing smile. (It had to do with a lady I was stepping out with at the time.) Lord Black, our then proprietor, was chatting with the Queen and signalled to me to come over. That is the only time I met Her Majesty. The wine flowed – we were only three tables of eight – and then the guests were invited to inspect the garden. I missed it because I was playing cricket at nearby Badminton. When I arrived late and slightly drunk, the Beaufort players let me have it. ‘I was lunching with the Queen,’ was my excuse. The volume of the abuse was turned up. But for once I was telling the truth. And I had been rude to the future king by ignoring his invitation to inspect his garden. But at least I had met the greatest of monarchs ever, and that’s something I won’t soon forget.