The all-seeing eye

They say you should never meet your heroes. Well, having interviewed Craig Brown, I still haven’t met any of mine, but only because our conversation was carried out over the telephone.

The Private Eye columnist’s fortnightly diaries are invariably brilliantly realised send-ups of the great and the good in British society, with characters as diverse as Noel Gallagher, Michael Moore, Martin Amis and Andrew Rawnsley among those to have suffered at the hands of the Eton graduate’s merciless wit down through the years.
This Is Craig Brown, a recently published collection of Brown’s journalism, bears endorsements on the cover from, among many others, Stephen Fry, Julie Burchill, Boris Johnson and Harry Enfield, providing conclusive proof of the writer’s lofty standing among contemporary humourists. It goes without saying that the material between the covers is uniformly excellent, whether Brown is musing on the social etiquette of dinner parties and golf, reminiscing about his encounters with Peter Cook and Alan Clark, or penning wickedly satirical articles in the guise of his celebrated alter-egos, Observer columnist and conceptual artist, Bel Littlejohn, and veteran social and political commentator, Wallace Arnold.
However, those in search of instant comedic gratification will undoubtedly proceed directly to those sections of the book devoted to Brown’s Private Eye columns. Particularly hysterical are ‘I Came Away Deeply Depressed: The Paddy Ashdown Diaries’ and a parody of Tony Blair’s oratorical style, ‘This Is What I Call Strong’, which lampoon the meaningless rhythms of, respectively, political memoirs and conference speeches with surgical precision.
“Well, funnily enough, before New Labour came to power in 1997, I would have considered myself a Blairite man,” says Brown. “But really, their paranoia about presentation and public perception quickly became very acute, to put it mildly. So those conferences are really a gift to someone like myself, because they’re just so simplistic and the speeches are such utter rubbish, it becomes more a matter of editing than anything else. The political memoir genre is a slightly different affair, because I tend to believe that memoirs generally – as opposed to diaries – veer toward revisionism and embroidering to one’s own advantage.
“It’s really quite funny, because in that particular book you’ve got poor old Ashdown in the middle of all these figures like Blair and Clinton, and he seems somehow to have deluded himself into thinking he’s a supremely important player in the political intrigue of our times. When in reality, as soon as Blair realised he had a landslide majority on his hands, it was ‘Cheerio Paddy, we’ll chat some other time’. Although at least Ashdown, in fairness to him, published his recorded diaries from the period. Clinton’s book is useless because it’s clearly just him squabbling around for half-baked theories about his childhood and desperately trying to smooth over the rough patches that cropped up during his presidency.”
However, Brown admits that he’s more well-disposed towards certain targets than others.
“Something like Andrew Rawnsley’s book on New Labour was actually quite good,” he acknowledges. “I mean, I knew Andrew Rawnsley when I used to do the parliamentary sketches for the Times, and I tend to have a weakness for those kinds of books generally. I think what I was doing there was more a light-hearted dig at the language of political books, which is increasingly leaning toward melodrama and portentousness; everything is a ‘bombshell’, a ‘revelation’, a ‘rollercoaster’.”
Over the years, Brown has been consistently effusive about the Alan Clark Diaries, the often hilarious memoirs of the rampantly libidinous, ultra right-wing and chronically neurotic late Tory MP. Brown tells in his book of meeting Clark at a party the Conservative politician threw to mark his return to Westminster in 1997.
“I met Alan Clark socially on a few occasions,” recalls Brown. “He was probably a deeply unpleasant man in many respects, but he was just so unabashed about his own absurdity that it was possible to warm to him. That time I met him in 1997, he’d thrown a party on the terrace of the House of Commons. It was full of the absolute worst people in London; Eve Pollard, Andrew Neil, Jeffrey Archer, all of them. I must have been drunk – because usually I’m quite polite in those situations – and I said to him, “I suppose Michael Winner will be here next.” He then told me he’d invited Michael Winner, but he’d opted to go to a film premiere instead!
“Christ, he was a character. He actually went through a phase where he became quite enthusiastic about football hooligans. He had this theory that if they had have been around during the first World War, they would have been national heroes, because they would have been the soldiers on the frontline seeing off the enemy. It was that kind of shameless outrageousness that made his Diaries so popular, I think.”
Brown mentions in the book that he prepared one particular Private Eye diary by immersing himself in the speech transcripts and articles of his victim. Is that how he gears up for his column generally?
“This is going to sound quite anorak-y, but yes,” he replies. “I just finished the latest Private Eye diary this afternoon actually, and it’s based on a journalist; she used to be a left wing alarmist and now she’s a right wing alarmist. So I had them send me down about ten of her articles. My favourite is one entitled, ‘Junk Ethics: The Decline Of Youth Culture’. I’ve underlined a few choice passages and phrases: ‘orgy of self-debasement’; ‘No Man’s Land of moral impropriety’; ‘sordid degeneracy’; and – a personal highlight - ‘Can murder be that far behind?’
Finally, he sighs. “I think I’ll be in business for a while yet.”

This Is Craig Brown is available in all good bookstores, published by Ebury Press.