Simon Hoggart's week: The flocking 'bigot' who did for Brown

✒I spent last weekend in Cheltenham, at the literary festival, plugging my new book, A Long Lunch, which is not a memoir, but memories – stories and people I have encountered on the way. Cheltenham gets bigger every year. When it started on Friday they had already sold 105,000 tickets and the tent city near the town hall could be a refugee camp for Boden wearers and Actimel drinkers. The nice thing, when you're a writer, is that they give you and your partner wristbands which get you into anything you want to go to. So we caught Sebastian Faulks, who said, startlingly, that the first page of his novel Engleby had come to him in a dream and that much of the book had, he felt, been dictated to him so that all he had to do was write it down, like a shorthand typist. "Halfway through, I wondered: where is this going? Blimey, goodness me." And the book does have that dreamlike, almost ghostly feeling. Michael Cockerell, of the superb BBC political documentaries, said he had been told that the great Gillian Duffy horror that Gordon Brown suffered in Rochdale – the "bigot" remark – had probably been caused because instead of hearing what she actually said, "immigrants flocking over here", he thought she used the word "fucking", which would account for his crossness. By the way, while the story filled all the media at the time, and it was generally agreed by the punditing classes that it had lost the election for Brown, Labour actually gained Rochdale from the Lib Dems. They take a more robust view of these things up there. ✒Justin Webb, of the Today programme on Radio 4, recently back from working in the US, said there had been a complete reversal in the politics of our two countries. In the past, the differences between the main parties in America had been slight; now they were complete opposites, the frothing rage of the Tea Party Republicans versus the calm of the "socialist" Obama. It had become a madhouse, he said. Whereas in Britain, he thought, the approach to the deficit was more grown-up with the parties, despite the usual artificial anger, broadly in agreement. He described the Democratic convention in Denver, when Obama was formally selected as the candidate. The place was intolerably, crushingly crowded, and he had found himself forced up against an elderly African-American, his nose jammed into the man's back. He found himself thinking of the years of oppression he must have endured, and what an astounding epiphany it must have been for him to see the first black presidential candidate. He resolved to interview him on this great occasion, then squeezed round and saw it was Sir Trevor McDonald. ✒All big literary festivals have the embarrassment – for some – of the signing queue. Some people, especially novelists, get long ones. Some authors attract no-one. The second longest line I saw (the longest was, as always, for children's author Jacqueline Wilson) stretched from the table occupied by Alexander McCall Smith. His fans snaked through the book tent and out into the gardens. Meanwhile, two ladies – I will not name them – sat at the next table, almost entirely untroubled by purchasers, chatting to each other and meeting the occasional friend. They didn't seem to mind, but it does hurt a bit if you don't get anyone. ✒Also in Cheltenham, Martin Amis wrote about the difficulties of writing sex scenes. Evelyn Waugh said that because you couldn't describe sex at all in his day, the readers simply slotted in their own sex life, which would inevitably be wrong. The other problem is that the great majority of sex scenes are meant to be mind-blowingly wonderful. I wondered how, say, Mills & Boon would cope with sex as it more commonly is: "She was literally burning with desire as she smoked her fag. I knew that she wanted me, needed me, desperately. 'Come on, get on with it, I haven't got all night,' she said, and her words sent an electric thrill through my whole body, now arched, taut as a bowstring, as we yearned for the consummation we both craved insensately. "She was hungry. This I knew. 'You haven't got a Mr Kipling's there, have you? I haven't eaten all day.' There was an aching void inside her, and only I could fill it. "It might have lasted all night, but the melding of our bodies and senses passed in what seemed like micro-seconds of almost unbearable passion. 'Blimey, you finished already? I've heard of a quickie …'" ✒Have you noticed the "DrinkAware" campaign and its web address? It is supposed to discourage binge boozing, but you see it mentioned often outside bars offering half-price drinks, buckets-o-beer, treble vodkas for the price of a single, and so forth. Reader Trevor Davies spotted it on a bottle of Beck's Blue, a totally non-alcoholic beer. "Yet it doesn't appear at all on regular Beck's, which is actually quite strong," he writes. Just as the finest Cuban cigars have Smoking Kills labels stuck to the boxes, I'd like to see a DrinkAware logo on a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée Conti (up to £7,000 a bottle) to discourage 17-year-old girls from glugging it in the street. ✒More stupid labels – part of the ongoing series. Richard Bundy from Salford sends in a packet from Walkers Sensations, Thai sweet chilli flavour, "made with real ingredients". He asks, as opposed to what? Imaginary ingredients? Surreal ingredients? I suspect it means "made from actual chillis and not some chemical that has a nasty flavour remotely resembling chillis". And Francesca Forber in Leicestershire sends the Visitor Information Leaflet for the 2010 Horse of the Year show at the NEC in Birmingham. Under the heading "asthma" it warns: "Asthmatics are advised that horses are the predominant feature of this event."