This week I have written a diary of the New Statesman. Here it is…
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And so to the Frankfurt Book Fair. I’ve managed to escape going for the last four years, but this year I thought I’d better make the effort. My company, Biteback (publishers of THAT book on David ‘Hameron’) has a stand there and the aim is to identify books from foreign publishers that might work in the UK and sell rights of our books to foreign publishers. I wasn’t sure what interest there would be in CALL ME DAVE from overseas publishers but I’m delighted to say that the book has attracted the keen interest of one of America’s biggest publishers, and we have an agent who thinks she can sell rights to most European countries. An Estonian publisher told me that our PM is very popular in her country. Who’d have thought!

I have to say my most enjoyable moment of the week was having to explain ‘piggate’ to an Israeli publisher. Strangely I doubt whether it will be appearing on the shelves of Israeli bookshops very soon.

Talking of Israel, our stand isn’t far away from the Israeli Publishers’ Collective. It’s the only stand with a permanent security presence of two men dressed in black with earpieces. I walk past it three times a day and I have never seen a single person on the stand smile. Even when they had a Falafel party (when the security presence increased to six men) no one seemed to be enjoying it. I resisted the temptation to wander by humming ‘don’t worry, be happy’. What a sad state of affairs it is when a publisher feels it needs to hire security because of the risk of an anti-semitic attack. In Germany of all places.
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Thirty years ago this summer I graduated from the University of East Anglia (or University of Easy Access, as it was known in those days) with a degree in German. Having spent two years living in Germany, teaching and working as a nurse (no sniggering at the back) I became totally fluent in the language to the extent that whenever I told a German I was English they refused to believe me. In one case I had to prove it by showing them my passport. Sadly, though, having had few opportunities to speak the language in three decades, my oral abilities have declined somewhat, although I can still understand everything. So it was with some trepidation that I drove to Bad Wildungen at the weekend to visit old friends and the woman I call my ‘German mother’. In the end I needn’t have worried. We picked up as if the previous two decades hasn’t existed. And that’s what true friendship is all about, isn’t it? And my German hadn’t deteriorated quite as much as I had feared. In any case, even if it had, so many English (or American) words have been incorporated into German, I could have probably got by. We now have three new German verbs – downloaden, streamen and skypen. Ich downloade, du streamst, sie haben geskypt. Ausgezeichnet.
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This was my first visit to Germany since 2011, but not a lot seems to have changed. The concept of corner shops which stay open all hours still hasn’t reached the country. Having last week attended my third speed awareness course, it’s been a delight to be able to drive like the clappers (I reached 130mph in my hired Volvo 4×4) on the autobahn without fear of being stopped by the police, and German radio still hasn’t climbed out of the 1980s. Politically, they still obsess about the English and their loss of empire, they scratch their heads in disbelief at why we are so Eurosceptic (although that’s gradually changing) and they want to know all about Kate. Really. Ask them about the VW scandal, though, and invariably the subject will be changed in the shortest time possible. The Germans know all about national guilt, and the VW scandal has brought it all back. “It has brought shame on the whole country,” said one friend. “No one believes there were only two people who knew about it. There must have been hundreds who just turned a blind eye.” Now, where have I heard that before?
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This week I’m publishing a book by award winning journalist Alan Friedman on Silvio Berlusconi, called MY WAY. It’s the nearest thing Berlusconi will get to an autobiography, I suspect. He spent one hundred hours with Friedman talking about his life, experiences and the people he has met. It’s all on video too, and Friedman is releasing a lot of it concurrently with the book, including some fascinating footage of Vladimir Putin and other world leaders opining about Berlusconi. The former Italian premier gave Friedman total editorial control over the manuscript, although a few months before publication he bought the Italian publisher of the book! So far I haven’t received an offer I couldn’t refuse to buy Biteback… Although there has been an incident of a pig’s head…
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Back in London on Monday, and it was the book launch much of Westminster had been waiting for. Altitude, on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower is a great venue for such an event, and it played host to 400 people eagerly awaiting Michael Ashcroft’s author’s speech. Sadly all they got was a speech from me instead. Unbeknown to anyone Michael has been seriously ill for the last month. In fact, at one stage it was touch and go. Thankfully he is on the road to recovery, but was unable to make the launch of CALL ME DAVE. I suspect he had to be strapped to his bed because I know that he would have been desperate to attend. Much has been said about him supposedly hanging Isabel Oakeshott and me out to dry by not doing any interviews about the book himself. Only she and I knew the truth, and for once we both kept our respective gobs shut. As it turned out, I read out the book launch speech Michael would have given, had he been there. It’s the only time in my life I have been asked to stand in for a billionaire. Michael finished by saying: “I have fought many political and business battles over the past half century but this is the first one – and, I trust, the last – in which I haven’t led from the front.” We both look forward to him rejoining the fray very soon. As I am sure does the prime minister.