Hobnobbing with the Tories

Hi, I'm Andrew Neil.
You may know me from televised political boredom and photos in Private Eye.

Last week, skilled manipulation of some fairly flimsy contacts resulted in me being entertained at the End of Summer Party at The Spectator. This featured free booze (excellent), free upper-crust hot dogs (british farm sausages in hand-made bread), and besuited live musicians playing the kind of pallid background jazz you only notice has stopped when they start again five minutes later.

This illustrates that the best way of escaping the corporate rat race and making money from your art is to sell your art to the corporate rat race. This in turn is a very bad way of escaping the corporate rat race and thus illustrates the futility of life.

Another futile thing to do in life is go celeb spotting. I've been out of the British political loop for a good while, and I only recognised 4 people there. The first 3 of those were people I work with every day, which was encouraging, as it showed I was in the right place, and that I was not blind drunk. The fourth was Andrew Neil, whose presence I noted in a fairly impassive "oh, that's 'im off 'telly" sort of moment. Boris Johnson, former editor, whom I'm told is a popular figure these days, was sadly nowhere to be seen.