PRESS UPDATE : THE SPECTATOR : JANUARY 18TH 2025 ..

 Diary

Am I a MAGA icon?

Joan Collins

‘Traitor!’ the woman yelled at me the instant I entered the beautifully decorated living room of a famous actress. It was a Twelfth Night celebration, and the room was full of glamorous friends and acquaintances. ‘What?’ I replied, bemused. ‘That photo!’ she screamed, ‘How could you take that picture with all those Republicans?’

Over Christmas I had been to a dinner hosted by some good friends who happen to be Republicans. This, it turned out, was a great crime. I am a Tory but have many socialist friends and we get along just fine and have hearty and amusing conversations. Here in America, though, it seems Democrats and the Republicans cannot even mingle. ‘Are you kidding me?’ I asked her. ‘No, I’m not,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t come to your country and get involved in your politics.’ The trouble was that she had read about the dinner on Mail Online, in an article declaring: ‘Hollywood icon is named MAGA Patriot.’ Next day there was another headline: ‘Why MAGA Patriot Joan will always be in Trump’s corner.’ I am almost certain that the ‘source’ of this tidbit is an LA wannabe who makes money by feeding trash to the media. ‘Dailymail.com has contacted reps for Collins for comment,’ it added ungrammatically. As The Donald would say: ‘Fake news.’

A week later, an ominous report on TV said there was a fire in Pacific Palisades. Within an hour, the Pacific Coast highway was shut down and the airwaves were full of news of major destruction. The TV showed palm trees ignited by embers blown by the 90-mile-an-hour wind. I kept a keen eye on the palm trees that surround our high-rise apartment. My son, his wife and toddler daughter were preparing to fly back to Europe but, with the sky now black with smoke, we were concerned their plane might not be able to take off. The winds howled so loudly that the windows shook and when the request came in to evacuate Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Santa Monica, I confess I went to find my passport in case we were next.

We spent the entire day watching the devastation on TV and the trees bending at 90-degree angles from the windows, while texting friends who had been told to evacuate. ‘Let’s watch something to take our minds off all this tragedy,’ I said at some point, and for some baffling reason blurted out: ‘Towering Inferno!’ ‘I doubt that will take our minds off it,’ said my husband. Nevertheless, we settled down in bed to watch that excellent disaster film, and the last thing I remembered was Steve McQueen as the fire chief saying: ‘It’s outta control and it’s coming your way!’

We woke the next morning to the horrifying news that the whole of Pacific Palisades had been destroyed. Thousands of people, including dozens of close friends, had lost their homes, and the fire still raged on, aided by the high winds. Schools and businesses were closed, and more fires were spreading in other areas, surrounding urban Los Angeles. Yet doddering old Prez Biden gave an unintelligible speech to the nation to announce the birth of his new great-grandchild. I mean, who cares?

We ventured out to buy some essentials, and when we were stopped at the lights a homeless man approached us, asking for money. As we always use cards we didn’t have much cash, but Percy managed to scrabble up a handful of loose change. The man dismissed this offering. ‘You ain’t got no notes?’ As we headed home, Percy received an emergency alert on his phone stating that we were in an ‘evacuation warning’ area and should start gathering together our important belongings. Naturally, we panicked and started frantically packing, when he received a second alert telling us to disregard the notification, as it was for another area. Our nerves were frazzled.

The absolute tragedy is that the enormity of the fires was preventable if some basic maintenance steps had been taken, according to media reports. Fire department budgets had been slashed in favour of other programmes; no programmes were in place to remove underlying brush, which is something they enforce rigorously around my property in the south of France; the reservoirs which feed the fire hydrants (standpipes) were allowed to run dry apparently in an effort to preserve an ‘essentially worthless fish called the smelt’. This all smelt fishy. The next day, with the fires still raging and the smell of smoke overwhelming, we decided to take Steve’s advice and ‘get outta town’.