Training | 2009.11.28
Hugh Muir's diary
In the coming year we shall welcome whatisname. Wears white. Rides a milk float
Sharp-eyed Catholics were quick to notice that the Queen raved during Wednesday\'s speech at the prospect of her state visit to Trinidad and Tobago as well as greeting South Africa\'s president, Jacob Zuma. But one state visit she didn\'t mention was that of Pope Benedict XVI, who is due here next year – the first papal visit since 1982. It couldn\'t be that she is offended by the pope\'s new offer of house room to disaffected Anglicans; his poaching members of her church? No. She\'s gagging to meet him too. It was a mistake.
What can they expect at ITV now that the tortuous search for a chairman is over and Archie Norman , the man who saved Asda, is on his way? Ask the Tories. For during his brief, failed stint as an MP, he planned to extend his brief as superhero by saving the Tories as party leader and, over time, prime minister. The problem was charisma. He didn\'t have any. Cecil Parkinson once observed: "I like to think I helped win a couple of general elections, but I didn\'t think that entitled me to think I could run a supermarket chain. Archie thinks that because the checkout girls at Asda clap him he\'s got the common touch." But then, politics is a nest of vipers. Whereas television …
Not much égalité about Air France\'s passenger launch today of the giant Airbus A380. It will fly from Paris to New York with 158 dignitaries/celebrities who haven\'t paid a thing. As for the 380 others, they bought tickets on eBay. No one will say until the plane is ready to go exactly who the freeloaders are, or how much the eBayers stumped up for the privilege. As a result, many are expected to spend the journey finding who overpaid. The only certainty is that President Sarkozy won\'t be flying. He and Obama don\'t get on, so the US isn\'t his favourite place these days.
Famously prickly these titans of politics, and especially Gordon. But this week Oona King, ex-MP, ex-Downing Street and now head of diversity at Channel 4 , was telling Colourful Radio, a digital station, about his lighter side. It was her first day at No 10, the sitter let her down and she was forced to take the baby in. The room seemed chilly as she presented herself to the PM and, stern as he can be, he directed her to follow him. "I thought I was about to get the sack," she said. In fact he opened a drawer and turned to her with a train set. What does he normally do with it? Don\'t ask.
More on Mark Lowe , the financier involved in the week\'s raciest employment tribunal. A former employee says he brought a prostitute to a business meeting and then hired a hitman to head off her claim for sexual discrimination. He says it\'s all nonsense. The wheels of justice turn. Yesterday we mentioned that those who knew him at Balliol College, Oxford are watching the case with interest and that to some he was known as Markedlylowe grades. But they are pernickety, this Balliol set, and one gets in touch to say that the nickname was not Markedlylowe grades, which one might have taken – rightly or wrongly – as a comment on his academic abilities. It was Markedlylowgrade, which was, apparently, how some saw him. This doesn\'t impact either way on the case now ongoing. But we see the distinction and are happy to set the record straight.
Finally, it\'s a kinder, gentler life they lead in Edinburgh. They seem to have time to care about each other. Time to talk. Just this week, a friend of the diary took her 90-year-old dad to a cafe there, and he noticed a lady with her laptop, sitting alone. "See that girl typing over there," he said, pointing. "She must live in lodgings and has nowhere to work." But JK Rowling (pictured), for it was she, can work where she likes these days. She was there out of choice.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/20/diary-pope-rowling-air-france
