This time last year, I went to a fundraiser for the Tories, the sort of splashy evening where Namibian safaris and Highland shooting weekends are auctioned for tens of thousands of pounds to refreshed hedge-funders, ie men who then never bother to go as they’re too busy making lots more money.
Between dinner and auction, the Prime Minister rose to his feet to shake the money tree. He opened with a joke about the trouble he’d had getting to the event. ‘We were really worried we’d be late this evening,’ he said. ‘The traffic was terrible. So we had to speed to get here on time. It’s a good job Samantha was driving – or at least, ha ha, that’s what it says on the forms!’
This got a big laugh as Cameron was, of course, taking a pop at his Lib Dem partners with a risque gag at the expense of Chris Huhne, a man who’d been forced to resign from the Cabinet after being charged with perverting the course of justice for using his ex-wife, Vicky Pryce, to avoid penalty points for speeding.
Resigned: Chris Huhne was forced to resign from the Cabinet after being charged with perverting the course of justice for using his ex-wife, Vicky Pryce (pictured together in 2010), to avoid penalty points for speeding(Huhne last week finally admitted he’d lied, and is likely to receive a custodial sentence, while Pryce is pleading ‘marital coercion’, claiming she was forced to take his points.)
After Cameron sat down, two women present admitted they’d also taken points for their high-rolling husbands and then someone revealed that an anointed member of the Establishment, whose firm views you have often heard on Question Time, has also asked his wife to take not one set of points – but TWO.
So, there’s no doubt in my mind that the world is full of married men with nine points on their licences (and who have mistresses too, probably) who have cajoled their wives into taking the next three so they won’t hit 12 points and be banned from driving.
But that is now by the by. Forget the triviality of the offence (we all know someone who’s done it), l’affaire Huhne, this Big Brother for the political class, is now about a man and a woman behaving badly.
Neither Pryce, nor Huhne, comes out of this smelling of roses. It is all too easy to cast the pair as Medea and Jason in this Greek tragedy: the woman scorned who destroyed her own family in order to wreak her fatal revenge on her absconding lover. So I won’t. Instead, I’m desperately trying to find the upside of this howling Huhne family nightmare.
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Though it’s grown-up never to take sides in these things, it does seem as if Huhne, as a toddler would whine: ‘Started it.’
In 2010, when warned that a newspaper was about to break the story of an affair with his aide, Huhne told Pryce that their 26-year marriage was over.
He then nipped into his study to write a short press release announcing this. Then he went to the gym. The Olympics Opening Ceremony of private anguish – now witnessed by millions – which has resulted from his urgency to ‘kill the story in 30 minutes’ and speed away from the wreckage of his marriage, has been excruciating.
So excruciating that the taped calls, the tearful revelations of abortion, abuse, mistresses and betrayal, those unbearable text exchanges between father and son might end up serving as a national deterrent not just for speeding, but also for hasty divorce.
Even now, perhaps, couples up and down the land are quickly revising and updating their own marital highway code, so they too don’t suffer such a catastrophic breakdown on the cold hard shoulder of life.
So the Huhne saga may not be the most brilliant advert for the institution of marriage. But it does serve to remind us that one of the founding principles of the institution is the same as that of nuclear conflict: that of mutually assured destruction. Both of you know that it only takes one of you to push the button, reveal you took the points, for the whole family unit to atomise in a poisonous mushroom cloud.
Notwithstanding the Magdalene laundries of dirty linen we have all seen in Southwark, the courts will not punish Mr Huhne for making his wife have an abortion, or for having a stable of mistresses.
All of that is irrelevant. They will penalise him for lying about a minor and common infraction of the law that even our Prime Minister makes after-dinner jokes about. And Vicky Pryce is not on trial for having plotted to ‘nail’ him, but for the same offence.
For me, one the saddest elements of this story is that neither Huhne nor Pryce, who both face jail, is a danger to the public.
They have revealed once again how limitlessly destructive and dangerous a disunited couple can be to each other.
We'll never replace Delia, or her trusty Alpine Eggs Fed up: Delia has had enough of TV cookery showsSo, Delia Smith is hanging up her apron to do an online cookery show. She’s fed up with food on telly, its artificial ingredients of fake friends, fairy lights, finger-licking and fish fights. Good for her. To her credit, Delia never tried to be entertaining, let alone vogueish. She was more Open University than celebrity chef.
So one can see why any suggestions that she might spice up her act were doomed to curdle faster than my custard. Delia’s first-ever TV recipe, in 1973, was a dish of eggs mixed with butter and chives, topped with cheese, and baked. Her recipes may not be fancy (see Alpine Eggs, above) but they always work.
We will not see her like again, on TV anyway.
Tying the knot, with a twistOne more thing about marriage: I do think those who argue for a one-cap-fits-all system may have a point.
A gay friend tells me that when he got hitched last year, the registrar opened proceedings on the Big Day by looking both men mistily in the eye and popping the question: ‘Have either of you undergone gender-reassignment surgery and become a woman?’ He explained that if one had, then the pair would be an opposite-sex couple, ineligible for civil partnership and would have to get married instead.
After that somewhat buzz-killing start, the ceremony went with a bang as – my friend reported with some satisfaction – ‘both mothers cried’.
My inbox is full of spam telling me about ‘adorable’ Valentine gifts I can buy for babies, decorated with twee Cupid’s arrows and love hearts.Like everything else about Valentine’s Day – the gruesome twosomes dining together over a bottle of prosecco, the emetic messages between Snookums and Snugglebuns, and the padded pink Hallmark cards – this is not funny, cute or romantic.
