Londoner's Diary: Theresa May and Vogue mag's Anna Wintour: fashionable friends

In today's Diary: The Dame and the PM: their history | Trump in German: 'Ich kann bing, bing, bing machen' | Miriam Gonzalez's octopus | The new royal satirist?
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16 January 2017

Which came first, the news of the damehood or the Vogue cover? The Londoner was wondering after it was revealed this weekend that Theresa May had agreed with Anna Wintour to be photographed for American Vogue, after its editor was made a dame in the New Year’s Honours List.

May’s photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz took place at Chequers last week. It will feature in the April issue, which arrives on newstands in March, just in time for the PM’s expected visit to the States.

The magazine has lead times of two to three months but the discussions between Vogue and No 10 are thought to have begun in the autumn, before Trump’s victory.

Wintour’s damehood, Downing Street reminded The Londoner this morning, was recommended by an independent panel but would have been rubber-stamped by May and signed off by the Queen. A Cabinet Office spokesperson said Wintour’s nomination would have come through the Foreign Office as she is a US citizen. “I can’t disclose who submitted the name, or any name,” said the spokesperson. Wintour was likely to have known about the award well in advance of it being made public.

However, this won’t have been impromptu political positioning. May and Wintour have long respected each other and took tea together in September 2011. May is, of course, a subscriber to the British edition of Vogue and aware of the power of fashion. Meanwhile Wintour’s ability to cross on to the political catwalk is legendary: she knows Donald Trump and has helped broker a peace between him and Vanity Fair.

It was too early to get through to US Vogue but British Vogue said: “We look forward to seeing Mrs May in our sister publication.”

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A new era of straight talking at The Times? Perhaps spurred on by its Trump exclusive, the newspaper’s Times2 insert has printed a guide to a new management technique, advocating “radical candour” in office environments. “We don’t use it in Times offices,” Times magazine supremo Nicola Jeal tweeted. “Yet.”

“Oh piss off, Nicola,” her colleague Philip Collins retorted. That caught on quickly.

Scotland heralds Trump’s inauguration

Flicking through the TV section of Scotland’s Sunday Herald, The Londoner found an interesting entry in Friday’s listings: “After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history.

“This huge interactive virtual-reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present ... It’s a flawed piece but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into if we’re not careful.” The show in question? President Trump: The Inauguration, 4pm on BBC1 and STV.

Russians and Brits dig deep for charity

Star-crossed lovers flocked to the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday for a charity concert featuring music from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Actors Ralph Fiennes, below left, and Vanessa Redgrave gave readings from Shakespeare’s sonnets at the event, in aid of children’s cancer charity Gift of Life. Olga Kurylenko and Betty Bachz, below right, also attended the showcase of Russian and British culture.

Restaurateur Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini, right, castigated The Londoner for checking their phone during the performance, despite doing the same himself. “It’s different for me, I’m taking care of business,” he claimed. If it had been another Shakespeare the Londoner might have asked: “3G or not 3G?”

Trump’s a gift that keeps on binging

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Michael Gove’s Times interview with Donald Trump was polite and positive. Also present at the interview was Kai Diekmann from the German paper Bild. Would he have a different take? The Londoner dusted off our best schoolboy German to find out.

“I think we should have set up secruity zones in Syria, which would have been much cheaper,” Mr Trump said. “And the Gulf states should have paid for it.” Build now, someone else pays later, seemed to be a theme.

And never mind security leaks to BuzzFeed and the like, it may be Trump who needs keeping in check. “I just watched something... oh, I’m not allowed to show it to you, because it’s secret... but I just watched something about Afghanistan,” he said, pulling up short of showing classified security information to two journalists. But at least he’s learning about the world. Though he claims Nato is “obsolete” he is engaging with it’s requirement that members spend two per cent of GDP on defence. “Great Britain pays. There are five countries that pay what they should. Five. That’s not many, out of 22,” he said. Only there are 28, Bild pointed out. Oops.

But he’ll always have Twitter. “I can go bing bing bing and just keep going,” he said, though The Londoner rather prefers the German: “Ich kann bing, bing, bing machen und mache einfach weiter.” Viel Glück, Amerika.

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Prince Charles has co-authored a Ladybird book on climate change, out next week and part of a series for adults presented in traditional child-friendly form. Artist Miriam Elia, who first had the idea for the modern parody series, was surprised her books had HRH approval. “What have I started?” she wondered to The Londoner this morning. “Does this mean I am official satirist to the Queen?”

Miriam cooks for Malta

More knife-sharpening from Miriam González Durántez, pictured, the lawyer and wife of Nick Clegg, who posted a delicious recipe for Maltese octopus on her food blog Mum and Sons this weekend, a culinary response to Bernard Jenkin’s attack on Malta, after its prime minister Joseph Muscat said Britain should stick to EU institutions during Brexit. Jenkin said Muscat was “anxious to scoop for his tiny little island some of the spoils that he believes will fall out of Brexit”. The recipe is for a stew of octopus in tomato, with capers and lemon zest, a common Maltese dish.

It follows on from Miriam’s recipe for homemade Ferrero Rocher, after Nigel Farage’s Ritz party, and, after Isabel Oakeshott and Michael Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron, advice on how to cook a pig’s head.

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Row of the day: ex-Olympic gold medal-winner David Wilkie has cancelled his Virgin Active membership after being ticked off for swimming too fast. Old habits die hard.

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