If the best thing about a dinner party is the food something has gone seriously wrong. This was the truism missed by the BBC Four flop, Dinner with Portillo:
I was recently asked who my dream dinner party guests would be, and unsurprisingly neither Michael Portillo nor George Galloway feature in my list, as they do in the above video.
All of history, four guests... It's Come Dine With Me All Time Favourite From History Edition!
Melvin Bragg – The broadcaster, author and Labour Peer
Melvyn Bragg would be my first dinner party guest. Since beginning to host The South Bank Show in 1978, Bragg has
been a staple of British cultural life. He also presents In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, in which he and three experts discuss a
topic in science, history, philosophy or culture. The polymathic scope of the radio
and television shows Bragg makes would almost be enough to satisfy my
intellectual curiosity on its own, and having him as a dinner party guest would
provide enough variety of conversation to keep everybody entertained. Moreover,
his experience of chairing the discussions in In Our Time makes him the ideal person to bring order to the
conversation around the dinner table.
David Cameron – Prime Ministers do not get to the top of
politics by being boring dinner guests. Moreover, dinner with a sitting Prime
Minister offers a unique insight into the major political issues and public
policy challenges of our age. There is also the attractive proposition of being
able to give David Cameron my two cents on what his government is doing. The
idea that one can influence government policy over a few courses and a glass of
sherry is sometimes thought to be an outmoded and mistaken model of how policy
making is done; yet many people have donated substantial amounts of money to
the Conservative Party for the privilege of dining with David Cameron, and
there is an entire industry of lobbyists and advocates. Surely, they are not
entirely wasting their time and money?
Hillary Clinton – From present Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom to future President of the United States? Perhaps. But however one
rates Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016, she can justifiably claim to be one of
the most powerful women in the world, and would still be an excellent dinner
guest. Hilary has spent the last twenty years at the forefront of world
politics, initially as First Lady to Bill Clinton, then as an impressive
politician in her own right. During her four-year stint as US Secretary of
State she visited more countries than any other Secretary of State, and more
than most people on the planet. If eight years in the White House, a close-run
Presidential nomination campaign, and visits to 112 different countries does
not make for an excellent raconteuse, then surely nothing does.
Wittgenstein – The Austrian Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
would be my final choice of dinner guest. As well as being widely recognised as
one of the most incisive philosophers in history, Wittgenstein was renowned for
an extraordinary and intense charisma that deeply impacted those he came into
contact with, often eminent men and women in their own right. Wittgenstein was
also idiosyncratic in his own habits and way of life. Shortly after inheriting
a great fortune upon the death of his father, he gave it all away to his
(already exceptionally wealthy) siblings and henceforth led a life of extreme
frugality; during a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club he attacked
the guest lecturer, Sir Karl Popper, with a fire poker, giving rise to the
best-selling book, Wittgenstein’s Poker;
and despite being largely apolitical, he considered moving from Cambridge, where
he was undertaking philosophical research, to Stalin’s Russia to become a
manual labourer, even making an expedition to the Soviet Union to explore the
possibility. Every dinner party should have an eccentric oddball – Wittgenstein
would be mine.
David Cameron honestly would probably be the most pleasant company of these four people. He seems like a nice guy. I think part of the problem at the moment, however, might be that he's too easily influenced by exactly the kind of dinner conversation you rightly highlight as being more important than people think. He wants to do the right thing, but he also wants to be liked. And those are very rarely going to mean the same thing all the time.
ReplyDeleteHave you heard the theory that it was Wittgenstein who recruited a large chunk of the traitor Tabs for Soviet work when he was at Cambridge?