Taki | The Spectator columnists & writers

Meet the most influential brain in China

New York The LNG king Peter Livanos, an old and good friend, has sent me a very informative write-up about China. Peter knows as much as anyone what’s cooking behind what used to be known as the bamboo curtain, and he’s put me right about China when I’ve been wrong about the place in the past. For any of you unfamiliar with shipping terms, LNG stands for liquefied natural gas, something that costs a hell of a lot to carry over water. As a result, the ships that transport LNG cost even more than a hell of a lot to construct. I remember my father talking about building an LNG carrier, a new concept back then, but the cost was prohibitive. Poor Dad died rich soon after, and I only stayed in shipping for another ten years.

The roots of America’s unhappiness

New York An American columnist whose writing I used to enjoy until his bosses signalled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently reported that Americans are unhappier now than they have ever been. Especially in places that voted for The Donald. Apparently, a pollster found that Trump got the most votes in places where people felt the unhappiest. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t people vote against the status quo when misery levels are rising? Mind you, it could also be that those who ask the questions have a vested interest in the answers they get. Invent a misery level where voters are for Trump, then pour it on and predict strikes, crime and anti-government demonstrations. By the time you read this, the American midterm results will be in, and boring pundits will be telling us why people voted the way they did.

The golden age of motor sport

There are heroes and then there are unsung ones, and I basically prefer the latter as I have known a few of them in my lifetime. The funny thing is that I grew up learning only about famous heroes, the Ancient Greek type, starting with the semi-God Achilles. Homer didn’t deal with unsung heroes; everyone was larger than life, and there were only winners and losers. The person I’ll tell you about this week would not have been a Homeric hero, but he certainly was one while participating in the most dangerous game in the world. Lance Macklin was an Old Etonian, a second world war navy vet, and a dashing racing driver at a time when a shunt meant instant immolation and certain death. Just off the top of my head here are a few names of young top drivers that were lost while racing before the sport became safer than football or volleyball: Ascari, Castellotti, Levegh, Musso, von Trips, Behra, Collins, Bonnier, Portago, Bandini, Clark, Scarfiotti, Courage, Cevert, and hundreds more who died in the golden age of motor sport during the 1950s and 1960s.

New York’s new normal

New York Ms Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is a 40-year-old with modern Bagelite manners, and by that I mean they are not exactly those of, say, C.Z. Guest or Babe Paley, two ladies who are no longer with us but whose presence in drawing rooms we could rather desperately do with. Ms Draper is angry as hell and has declared she will not take it any more. She was recently charged with grand larceny and petit larceny for snatching a wallet from a Manhattan man. Nothing strange about that: it’s an everyday occurrence in the city that never sleeps. In fact a New York Post columnist wrote on a different matter that no one gets PTSD from ‘getting pickpocketed’. Yes, I agree, but for one small detail.

The death of humour

New York Rodney Dangerfield was the American Benny Hill: lewd, funny and not exactly politically correct where the weaker sex was concerned. In America today there is no room for Rodney’s or Benny’s shenanigans, and leering at women is now commensurate with having one’s rocket polished in broad daylight, perhaps even more so. I find it amazing to be daily bombarded by the shameless gimmickry, stupidity and smuttiness of television but deprived of talented comedians who tend to get on the wrong side of hatchet-faced feminists. The saccharine cesspool of late-night talk shows, the utter banality of actors and actresses talking about their latest films – this is what our modern culture has become. Never mind. I don’t watch these horrors so why am I complaining? I suppose it’s because of my Christian concern for my fellow men and women, whose brains are ripped, trashed, blasted and destroyed by the minute.

We’re all victims in the Bagel now – even me

New York That Kim Kardashian dame being fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a ‘pump and dump’ scheme should help add victimhood to her other assets. Everyone in this country revels in being a victim, or so it seems when watching the news or reading the papers. Here’s our own Jeremy Clarke, as ill as it is possible to be, and what we get is his brave and wonderful column every week, never complaining about how unfair it is, but expressing how lucky he feels to have Catriona taking care of him, and so on. I was telling a friend about this, in a deliberately loud voice, hoping that some wise guy would take exception and confront me, but no such luck. Victims would rather cry than fight, and everyone here in the Bagel is a victim – rich, poor, black, white, men, women, young and old.

In defence of privilege

Privilege at birth displeases wannabe types, and the subject came up rather a lot last week, especially in the Land of the Depraved, where the Bagel Times regards monarchy as anti-democratic and the cause of most human ills, including the common cold, cancer, pimples, varicose veins and even athlete’s foot. In my own alma mater, the University of Virginia, founded by the greatest of all Americans, Thomas Jefferson, some physically repellent creeps have demanded his name be taken off the beautiful neoclassical buildings he designed. The trouble is that Tom, as we called him in my college fraternity, was a bit anti-monarchical himself, having sided with and advised certain colonists starting with one called George Washington.

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’m a one-woman man

Gstaad There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the desert are still moping around. Building is going on non-stop and the cows are down from the mountains, making the village a friendlier and more civilised place. Something of a twilight mood has crept in, especially when I compare the cows with the people. Reclaiming vanished days is a sucker’s game, but it’s irresistible. I was up at my friend Mick Flick’s chalet the other afternoon, talking with Gstaad regulars about how much fun the place used to be. I tried the reverse of an old Woody Allen joke, announcing that taxis nowadays are so expensive I couldn’t keep my eyes on the lovely legs of the lady riding next to me.

My unforgettable night with a musical genius

Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago, she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the writer who was handsome but entrapped by Norma Desmond, aka Gloria Swanson. Nancy’s blue eyes shimmered, and her figure was to die for, but what made her memorable was that she was as American as apple pie. Innocence trumped sex in her case, and apparently she was as decent and as intelligent as the ingénue she played in that film. She quit the movies early on because it was too narrow a life. She’s now 94 and has written a book – and I for one can’t wait to read it.

It’s back to the 1970s

Gstaad As the great Yogi Berra explained: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again.’ The great one also contributed the following wisdom that: ‘You can observe a lot by just watching.’ Yogi came to mind as high inflation and a recession loom, and merry old England’s trade unions are reverting to type and blackmailing the government. And where is Margaret Thatcher now that she’s needed? Gone with the wind, that’s where. I started writing this column when James Callaghan was in No. 10 and Britain was on the brink. The Brits back then were over-taxed and the smart money had gone abroad. Paper money issued by the Treasury translated into higher prices, workers, via their trade unions, wanted higher wages to defend themselves against the rising of basic prices, and when inflation struck, they demanded even higher wages.

The thrill of sailing rough seas

Coronis I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it any more and I simply went along. Sixty years of being thrown around while giving the middle finger to Aeolus and Poseidon, and during the week of another disaster, my birthday, I threw in the towel and was driven to Coronis. A deep barometric low caused high winds with gusts of 11 to 12 Beaufort. My captain is something of a history buff and compared the storm to the one that wiped out the Anglo-French fleet in Crimea back in 1854. The Brits and Frogs were there in cahoots with the Turks against the Russians, of course.

The curse of the jet-ski

An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David S. Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as ‘the great post-Appomattox launch toward materialism’. I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat in the early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek village square for a coffee. There were some French people blabbing away with their usual hand gestures, Greeks discussing politics at high volume, and then an American couple, both quite attractive, each with a Mac in front of them and absolutely impervious to anyone or anything in their immediate surroundings. Talk about a launch towards materialism. The two of them never once looked up from their screens. They remained totally glued, expressionless, to that demon plastic – or whatever it is that screens are made of – and failed to look up even when a Greek woman got into a shouting match with an Austrian lady who had taken her chair.

Sun-drenched days and too much wine: my summer on Patmos

Patmos Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, monkeypox plague is afflicting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the US, there’s a war of attrition in Ukraine and Taiwan is being threatened by China. Gloom and doom are everywhere but here in the holy island of Patmos, where Saint John wrote the Apocalypse 2,000 years ago, the backward natives are still using pronouns such as ‘his’ and ‘hers’, and they even identify women as a biological reality. And it gets better – or worse, actually: the only conflict on this beautiful isle is the one between your intrepid correspondent and a young woman who demanded my table at Vaggelis, in the square where the elite meet to eat.

How Monte Carlo went to hell

I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilised tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so local talent will do nicely, and to hell with the vulgar jet set. Gstaad is perfect in June and July, March and April, as are St Moritz, the Ionian Islands, and Patmos, my next destination. Once upon a time the French Riviera was a must, but now it’s a sweaty hellhole, a shabby place for not so sunny people. Although I spent my youth on the Riviera, I was two going on three in 1939, the time I would have chosen to be an adult had I been given the choice. Old hands there used to tell me about that summer, the gayest – in the old sense of the word – on record. Back then Monte Carlo was still Ruritania-by-the-Sea, and whispers from late revellers about columns of troops between Cannes and Monaco had replaced the latest gossip.

In praise of Spectator readers

Michael Beloff, QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford, has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and politeness, but the sort we never read about. Instead, what is shoved down our throats are today’s politicians selling their snake oil on TV, or those untalented but self-entitled celebrities boasting about themselves, and the ultimate horrors, of course, the profoundly ignorant woke brigade who block free speech. I can’t remember how long ago it was that I received a telephone call from Michael who introduced himself and invited me to the high table at Trinity College, Oxford.

The Oprah-fication of Wimbledon

Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 – the year of the boycott – is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was 50 at the time, while Pam was 17, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, assuming it was legal. The age of consent varies from place to place, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father, whose 28-year-old daughter I had dated, rang me early in the morning and complained about me being 72. ‘There is no age limit as far as being too old,’ I told him. He rudely hung up on me. But before I go on about Pam Shriver and her oldie coach, a few comments are in order about how Oprah has taken over tennis and even Wimbledon.

The delights of two-timing

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two stand out because of the timing: it was one hell of a winter month of sex and switch and switch again.

In praise of the London sense of humour

London As speaker at a posh dinner given by Jonathan and Jake Goedhuis, best UK wine merchants by far, and attended by many swells including Anthony Mangnall MP, I somehow managed to finish the speech having tasted some very good wines in between. I nevertheless got lots of mileage from pointing out the fact that we Greeks were responsible for inventing the strike (Lysistrata), an act the British unions later on perfected. Ancient Greek women refused to have sex until the men stopped fighting and the ancient Greek philosopher Taki opined that the first strike ever was therefore successful, as the men naturally preferred sex to war. Ditto homosexuality, I announced. ‘We Greeks invented it, you Brits perfected it.

Don’t bet against Emmanuel Macron

It’s nice to be back on the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple of hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names such as Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff and their ilk. It meant that I flew out of the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has become unrecognisable, a violent land where a Democratic Congress winks at riots and intimidations by the left, and where career criminals are seen as victims. It is a place in which one’s livelihood can end with one slip of the tongue. And they call it a free country. Over here, in lefty old London, everyone’s against Boris, but telling whoppers over a party or two – or even ten – cannot compare to the lies Blair told to justify waging a war in which hundred of thousands of human beings died.

The magic of black and white films

He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the 1930s and 1940s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American heartthrob, who plays a rich drunken playboy who pursues Norma. But he does it with class and elegance, without a trace of toxic masculinity, a modern feminist broadside that didn’t exist among the upper classes back then. Okay, it’s a movie. But it’s one that kept me up until 3.30 a.m. although I was dead sober and dying with desire for Norma and that twilit nostalgic period.

The healing power of the Hamptons

Southampton, Long Island These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, up to the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among Wasp types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. By all means take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only micro-organisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, especially in the Hamptons. Never have I seen more chest-thumping, bandy-legged, bearded louts trash-talking as they pollute the beaches in this beautiful town. Southampton was once a luminous little village that served as a seaside refuge for New York’s civilised rich during the unbearable heat of urban summer.

In praise of Greek royalty

New York Prince Pavlos, heir to the Greek throne, turned 55 recently and I threw a small dinner for him. Pavlos is a hell of a prince, father, husband and businessman. He’s tall, good-looking, a gent in every way, intelligent, hard-working and has never put a foot wrong. Neither has any member of his immediate family. Compared with them, the rest of European royals seem wanting, but then I’m prejudiced. The Greek royals are Danes, and the oldest reigning clan of Europe. Unlike another royal family whose name escapes me – it is the Platinum Jubilee issue after all – the Hellenic one has had no divorces, no scandals, and if physical looks mattered, the Greek royals would be the ruling family of Europe. At present Pavlos comes to the dojo after work and trains hard.

Welcome to post-truth America

A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time partying with young friends here, but the place reeks, literally as well as metaphorically. The rate of violence is creeping up, with gangs shooting at each other even on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where the poor little Greek boy grew up. Where a commemorative plaque marking young Taki’s residence should have been put up long ago for services to American women, there was a corpse. The next day, it was forgotten, as an 11-year-old was gunned down in the Bronx. What used to be extreme radicalism is now the reigning ideology of every major American city. Speech patterns have changed, and the meanings of words are perceived not in the way they were intended.

The art of laziness

New YorkLiving a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of responsibility is beneficial to the soul, but also boring. I am stuck between the two at times, and I think age has a lot to do with it. A constant reminder of the very visible yoke of age comes daily, as I march up and down Park Avenue noticed by absolutely no one. I really don’t mind, cross my heart; in fact, it makes me laugh at times when I’m dressed to the nines and go unnoticed even by the panhandlers. And being dressed correctly nowadays makes one really stand out, like a giraffe among penguins. But in my case: nothing. Old age makes one invisible, which is fine if you’re a criminal, but not so fine if you have even the tiniest of egos.

Is Klaus Schwab the greatest threat of our time?

New York Alexandra rang me from London to enquire about a man by the name of Klaus Schwab: ‘He sounds like the greatest threat of our time. Should I be worried?’ ‘Nah,’ I answered. ‘He’s just another typical smooth-talking, smarmy Davos Man. ‘That’s what scares me,’ said the wife. For the very few of you who have not heard of Klausie baby, he is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, or WEF, a grandiose title and well deserved to be sure, although it once created a social media video that contained the slogan: ‘You will own nothing, And you’ll be happy.’ The WEF is where technocratic dreams make contact with business and political biggies high up in the Swiss Alps. Personally, I think it’s a networking scam, and the media have for a long time shielded the public from its goals.

The day Elizabeth Taylor kidnapped my daughter

New York Back in the good old days the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the hotel for Yankee swells, rich politicians such as JFK, and, of course, upper-class Eurotrash. Both my children were born at a hospital nearby, and both newborns spent their first month of life at the hotel. Alexandra and I would leave our nearby brownstone, which was more upside down, and move to the Carlyle, which was more sideways, thanks to my dad’s generosity. We were given the presidential suite with round-the-clock service and doctor availability galore. While waiting for her brother to be born, my five-year-old Lolly had the run of the hotel and took full advantage, raiding the formal dining room for sweets, demanding funds from the cashier (unsuccessfully) and playing with her toys in the middle of the reception area as the grandees came and went.

The glory days of Central Park

I celebrate two Easters every year, the Catholic one and the Orthodox one, which means I get very drunk on two successive Sundays. Both days were spent with very good friends, which is a prerequisite at my age when under the influence. The Orthodox Resurrection ceremony at midnight in the cathedral was followed by a sumptuous Greek dinner at a gastronomic Hellenic restaurant, hosted by George and Lita Livanos, that ended around 3 a.m. Then it was time for a Southampton outing and yet another Greek lamb Easter lunch at Prince Pavlos’s not so humble seaside abode. And then it was time to hit the gym non-stop for the next 96 hours in order to get rid of the tonnage devoured in this most Christian of holidays. The good news is that karate balances out the self-destruction, and I have yet to figure out what I enjoy more, fighting in the dojo against younger people or drowning the demons after training.

The sad demise of Brooks Brothers

New York Our own Douglas Murray is the canary in the Bagel coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education and technology over here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who get down on one knee every weekend to make themselves feel better for getting lotsa moolah for playing a game in the sun. It has to do with black lives and whether they matter or not. Black lives do matter, but not to those who run the racket that goes by the acronym BLM. According to Murray, writing in the New York Post, the biggest lie is the racket behind the rhetoric. One year ago the details of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors’s real-estate empire emerged.

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