UriGeller.com

When I was invited to contribute to a book of letters for my dear friend Greville Janner, to celebrate his eightieth birthday, I was in Russia. The only way I could beat the tight deadline was to zap back a message from my BB.

“Greville,” I texted, “I wish you health, happiness and peace of mind. I send you tons of positive energy. Your eternal friend, Uri.”

At a lavish party to salute Greville, a tireless parliamentarian, the finished book was presented to him amid many speeches and much cheering. There were letters from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jonathan Sacks, Patti Boulaye and Lord Winston, among hundreds of others. But mine was the only email!

Greville, Hunts and me

The book was an inspired idea, as Greville loves to send postcards himself. I have about 300 from him, sent from every corner of the globe over a quarter of a century, and I know he bombards many other friends with cards too.

Greville is an enthusiastic amateur magician, and throughout the evening talented conjurors moved from table to table, performing scintillating sleight of hand under our noses.

They included Marvin Berglas, the son of the grand old man of British magic, David Berglas, who was also there with his wife Ruth.

With about 350 people at the Jumeriah Carlton Towers, we needed 20 widescreen LED TVs to monitor Greville’s speech. I’ve never seen so much television technology, even in NBC’s studios for the live broadcasts of Phenomenon across the US.

With Ruth

The ceramic sculptor Ruth Sulke was among the guests. I adore pottery, and I was fascinated by her descriptions of creating and selling art, both in Britain and the Far East — she spends six months of each year in Hong Kong, and the orientalist George Bloch has collected many of her pieces.

There’s a major drawback to creating large-scale ceramics, Ruth confided: “Lifting them is hard work. It’s given me a bad back!”

When they were barely old enough to talk, Daniel and Natalie were fascinated by the pictures in their storybooks. Often I would make up my own tales to explain the illustrations, and always I’d include my children, my mother and all the rest of the family in the tale.

In my version of Red Riding-Hood, it was Joker, our dog, who saw off the greedy wolf and saved the granny.

So I was furious when I read that Professor Richard Dawkins, the world’s most voluble sceptic, has condemned fairy-tales as “anti-scientific”. He is retiring from his post at Oxford University and intends to devote his retirement to investigating whether age-old folk tales have a “pernicious effect” on growing minds.

This is the same man who has paid for adverts on London buses proclaiming that God does not exist, the academic who preaches that to describe a child as Muslim, Christian or Jewish is “a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse”.

God is a survivor

George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of Greville Janner’s guests, and I told him what I thought of Dawkins: “I feel sorry for the man if he can’t believe in God, and it’s ridiculous for him to shout about atheism all the time — he’s like a tone-deaf man trying to convince the rest of us that Mozart is just noise,” I said angrily.

 “But to attempt to suppress children’s stories and fairytale fantasies — he’s acting like the mind police.”

George was reassuringly calm. “I don’t disagree,” he said, “but I’m not concerned about adverts on buses and so on. God is much stronger than that!”

Annie was stricken by Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and though rigorous hospital treatment has cured her, she needs to follow a strict diet of organic food to maintain a healthy immune system.

I’m a great fan of organic produce, but I know it comes at a premium price, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Annie’s diet costs £200 a week.

She’s an enterprising young woman — other celebs who have answered her appeal include Gordon Ramsay, Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, Davina McCall, Robbie Fowler and Rod Stewart.

I’m happy to help, but it makes my blood boil that while youngsters like her need to fight for their futures, the taxpayer is handing over tens of millions to cushion banking executives as they fall from grace.

I believe that the bank directors who presided over a culture of greed that has led to international crisis and recession must be held responsible for their behaviour.

Instead of paying them off, we should be fining them every penny they ever siphoned off from the system. Let them end their days on the minimum wage — their personal billions should be poured into the health service to save young people like Annie.