Anyway I looked around me and it was a sea of miming middle-agers singing along and jiggling a bit

Anyway, I looked around me and it was a sea of miming middle-agers singing along and jiggling a bit. Except for Tom Stoppard, whose hips and lips never moved once, not even during “Satisfaction”. Tom, call me.YOU KNOW, if I were that Nick Leeson chap, the man in the frame over the Barings collapse, I shouldn’t be that keen on doing my time in Britain rather than Singapore. He and Norma are off, I understand, to the Dordogne and a villa Very middle class, John. Next you’ll be arriving in Downing Street with a Labrador and one of those four-wheel-drive efforts.n YES, YES, of course I was at the Rolling Stones concert, we all were. Great, great, marvellous for their age, should all be knighted, older than the average member of the Cabinet, you know, Jagger’s brilliant, always has been, but street fighting man, do me a favour, it’s all Lord’s and Lords now. John Major is not going to Portugal for his holidays this year Oh, no.

I, for my part, have now banned myself from whistling “La Vie En Rose” (much praised for its intense, warbling quality) and am point-blank refusing to let Citroens out into traffic.LISTEN, while I remember, I’ve got one of those exclusive thingies Oh, yes. Well, he got it, there’s a suspicion that he tasted it, but no report back Some nonsense about being too busy. Don’t do it if you’re going to be rude, as Grandmother Moonlight used to say, a touch peevishly. This was sent to him by the Yalumba people after he was particularly disparaging about the digger bubbles when invited in the House of Commons to join the anti-nuclear-testing French boycott and toast his master’s election success with it rather than champagne. And the curious accent, which I had always assumed was vaguely Scottish; and the smile, obviously a result of all that squinting into the sun.n TALKING about Australia reminds me that you are hankering to know what happened between Nicholas Soames, the defence minister, and the bottle of Australian sparkling.

Now you do not need me to tell you how crucial those early years are in the formation of character, which explains Tony’s colourful, terse way with language and his penchant for cold lager and dirty jokes. So, please, keep your eyes peeled out there.
MEANWHILE, the Captain has some information of immense significance concerning Tony Blair, who is, as you read, a guest of his new friend, Rupert Murdoch, on a small island off Australia. The information: Rupert has turned down Tony’s invitation to be Secretary of State for National Heritage in the next Labour administration No, that was a joke. The real griff, I am here to reveal, is that Tony spent part of his early childhood in Australia, in Adelaide, between the ages of two and five, when his father was lecturing at the university there.