‘I was 12 when I first got laid.’ ‘Where was that?’ ‘In Middlesbrough.’ ‘How the hell did you get lucky at 12 in Middlesbrough, when I only managed it at 15 and on my father’s boat off Cannes in 1952?’ ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’

This was no tortured confession by some doomed poet or gender-confused feminist, just party banter between the great Rod Liddle – who went Bulwer-Lytton on me – and the poor little Greek boy. The setting: the Old Queen Street garden where The Spectator is located and where we celebrated the sainted editor’s 50th birthday. Before I get to that, though, what is it about Middlesbrough? Is it the water, the climate or the girls that helped Rod lose his virginity so early? ‘I know who she is,’ was all he said when I pumped him for more details. Never mind. Rod’s wife soon joined us and he changed the conversation to economics: who will be the next lucky winner to own us? Now that’s the million-dollar question, if only it cost just a million to own Britain’s oldest magazine and the best the world has ever known. When I first joined The Spectator, it was passed from one proprietor to the next for nothing, as it cost a lot to own because it didn’t make a profit. Now that it does, it’s a whole different ballgame, as they say down in Louisiana.

Needless to say, the party was wonderful. Both Fraser and our chairman Andrew Neil gave reassuring speeches, and ordered the troops to stop speculating and start celebrating. Fraser has a very beautiful family, which as an ancient Greek I take to be a very good sign. Zeus and the rest of the gods created heroes with great looks, whereas they made the baddies look like crap. I spent most of the evening talking to features editor Will Moore and his lovely wife Hannah, and Rod and Alicia, and drinking white wine non-stop until the end. Andrew Neil took one look at me and decided to cancel our planned post-party drink at Robin’s.

Here’s a tiny detail about what drink does to one: I wore a blazer with a Pug’s club insignia, but ended up holding a leather jacket with some punk signs on it. I’ve never worn a leather jacket in my life, but ended up holding it as if it were the Holy Grail. Go figure, as they never say in Middlesbrough.

Rod consistently hits the jackpot with his punchy prose and ironic truths, and so we sat in the dark talking about writers we knew and some who are still with us. I just loved the matter-of-fact manner in which he recounted what happened when he was 12, like the guy at the stadium gate repeating: ‘Tickets please.’ The other thing I noticed while still sober was that no one I spoke to had anything to say about the defenestration of our ex-editor Boris, the very same Boris of tax hikes and net-zero shame, yet still the working man’s Brexit hero. The great Maggie had Heseltine’s dagger firmly stuck between her shoulders, just as Boris has Harriet and Sunak’s scimitar between his. So what else is new about the Conservative party? But as I said, the on dit on that particular night was about the Telegraph and The Spectator, c’est tout.

I don’t know why, but Boris reminds me a bit of Don Giovanni (not that he comes anywhere close to what Mozart’s hero managed where the fair sex is concerned). But the original title of the opera was Il dissoluto punito (‘the dissolute punished’). Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist, insisted on changing it, perhaps because Wolfie and he saw the opera as a yearning for forgiveness. The seducer, of course, cannot help himself. He assaults Donna Anna and seduces Donna Elvira and we know that he ends up in hell. But still, the Don is Mozart and vice versa and the composer never assaulted anyone in his short life. Maybe Wolfie secretly wished he had had 1,003 conquests in Spain alone, as Don Giovanni’s faithful servant Leporello’s Catalogue Aria lands twice on that refrain.

Nah, Boris doesn’t even reach a fraction  of that number, yet he still reminds me of the Don, by far my favourite operatic character of them all. Another ne’er-do-well, Count Almaviva, pulls aristocratic entitlement on Susanna, this time in The Marriage of Figaro, but Susie baby manages to escape, and true love wins out, as it always does with Wolfie and Lorenzo. Does it with Boris? I am only a poor little Greek boy and don’t know much about such matters, but me no think so.

The one thing I know is that back in the early 2000s, when the then proprietor Conrad Black, a good friend, decided that what I had written about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands was anti-Semitic in the extreme, Boris stuck by me and coolly pointed out that it was fair comment. Boris played fair and showed courage. Unlike those lousy parliamentarians who brought him down, I do not forget good deeds done to me, nor bad ones. In the meantime, I’m off to Middlesbrough. I cannot write like Rod but I’ve got more experience than a 12-year-old. Good things are sure to happen.