Dominic lawson

I was appalled. She had asked Lord John Somerset to ask me to join her, and I rose rather unsteadily to do so. This was during a Jimmy Goldsmith ball, and I was writing the Atticus column in the Sunday Times, as well as High life. A German girlfriend of mine at the time warned me about going over. ‘If you go to her, that’s it,’ she told me. ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ I answered. The princess signalled for me to sit, and that’s where the appalling part comes in. I missed the chair and ended up under the table. Without missing a beat, she stuck her head underneath and asked me:

Rosa Monckton is married to my old editor Dominic Lawson and they have two girls. Rosa was a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales and one who never spilled any beans about her. I once had a good laugh with Rosa over the stuff written about Diana and her Egyptian so-called boyfriend who died with her in Paris. Rosa knew the truth and I think I did too, but let’s leave it at that. Those who will go to any lengths for self-promotion will always be with us. Diana was a gift from God for them, and everyone knows how the jackals feasted on the ‘last romance’ for their

In a way the headline to my fellow columnist Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times commentary on 12 April said it all. ‘Join the pitchfork wavers on tax, Mr Cameron, and you end up skewered.’ The column had something of an 18th-century ring to it, conjuring in my mind’s eye an elegant London dinner party, with men-about-town in powdered wigs twitching back the heavy damask curtains to sneak worried glances at a riot outside: an unruly and enraged mob rampaging up the street. But Dominic had a powerful argument. It was, he suggested, noblemen like David Cameron and George Osborne who had unwittingly energised the rabble. Dominic had warned his readers of

In a way the headline to my fellow columnist Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times commentary on 12 April said it all. ‘Join the pitchfork wavers on tax, Mr Cameron, and you end up skewered.’ The column had something of an 18th-century ring to it, conjuring in my mind’s eye an elegant London dinner party, with men-about-town in powdered wigs twitching back the heavy damask curtains to sneak worried glances at a riot outside: an unruly and enraged mob rampaging up the street. But Dominic had a powerful argument. It was, he suggested, noblemen like David Cameron and George Osborne who had unwittingly energised the rabble. Dominic had warned his readers of

Until recently I used to claim that I had been literary editor of The Spectator for over 25 years; now I say almost 30. The trouble is I am not quite sure and it is curiously difficult to find out. Dot Wordsworth arrived on the same day as me but she cannot remember either. Each of us assumed that the other was an established figure and so our superior. A similar imprecision may undermine other memories. In the early Eighties then, when Alexander Chancellor had reinvented the magazine after a bad patch, and it seemed daring, anarchic and slightly amateurish, I wrote theatre reviews and one late afternoon went round