I was in HELLO! heaven, a tender world of ladies who lunch, minor celebrities, minor celebrities famous for being associated with proper celebrities, and a sky-lit, gold-moted haze of flattering lighting. “The beauty of this French stonework is that, whether it is daytime or night-time, it gives you the most beautiful glow on your face,” murmured Riccardo in a clotted Latin purr.Raine Spencer on the matter: “I think it’s very becoming to us ladies.”This is a world of ladies and sirs It is a world of scallops and pianos and champagne lighting. I was about to meet the man who had done rude things with Ivana Trump.”Floriana in Italian means a lady bearing flowers. My lunch date was none other than Ivana Trump’s most recent ex-husband, Riccardo Mazzucchelli, at his newly opened and much hyped Knightsbridge restaurant, Floriana, an event that was completed with a pause to exchange compliments at the table of Raine, Countess Spencer.
HELLO! incarnate HELLO! in Technicolor.

After shaking the hand of the daughter of Barbara Cartland and stepmother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, I was experiencing such a trivia junkie’s fit of over-excitement, I would hardly have been taken by surprise if Mandy Smith, Princess Caroline, a dynasty of obscure Euro-royals or a giant panda had walked into the room.As I waited in the cruise liner lobby with its marble, gold trim and half-hearted topiary, its spike heels, highlights and Vuitton bags, I could barely force myself to concentrate on my host’s restaurateur skills or Middle Eastern business triumphs No, I was distracted by childish thoughts. After a decade of rapt, some might say catatonic, devotion to HELLO! magazine, after a two-hour lunch worthy of its most oleaginous attentions, I now understand where I have been going wrong. I am severely lacking the tawny highlight, the slick of pomade, the precise one-and- a-half-centimetre lift from the scalp. The shibboleths of the ladies who lunch have quite passed me by, but I am here to learn. The West had a real civil society, with the key freedoms of belief, speech, press and assembly The East did not. That was what we Cold Warriors hated about it.But – and this is the most interesting point about the Cold War – those deficiencies do not explain why the East lost the war.

Indeed, in any explanation of the collapse of Communism, I believe the lack of liberty must play a very minor role.The fundamental reason for the Soviet failure lies in the fact that the Cold War never became a real war; it was its very coldness that proved fatal. The fundamental economic difference between the two systems was that the Soviets had perfected, in the rigours of the Forties, a system for waging large-scale war. As we now know, Stalin was unimpressed by the possibility of American atomic attack on the USSR even in the period before the Soviets detonated their own first A-bomb in 1949. “Atomic bombs,” he sneered in a newspaper interview, “are designed to terrify those with weak nerves.” Later, he shrewdly remarked: “America has the technical but not the human potential for war; it has the air force, it has the atomic bomb, but where is it going to find the soldiers needed to launch a third war?”This was spot on (hence Winston Churchill’s recently revealed contingency plans for an attack on Russia in 1945 were sheer fantasy). “I’ve fought my way up to where people can’t affect me anymore It’s no longer a win or die situation for me. In the last 18 months I’ve begun to have that wanted feeling.”Vinnie is beginning to sound touchy-feely But our chat is over “OK that’s it I’ve got a plane to catch,” he shouts The phone goes dead This time, I don’t redial.. I was only 13, just coming into being a man, then all that happened.