Postcards from the Edge

My Italian glamourpuss pal was Boris’s mother-in-law

Mary Kenny on Gaia Servadio, the Zuleika Dobson of Fleet Street

To be blonde, beautiful, brainy, acquainted with the Mafia and a member of the Italian Communist Party – what more could a girl have wanted back in those golden 1960s?

Gaia Servadio, who’s just died at 82, seemed to me to be the Zuleika Dobson of Fleet Street, appearing in the offices of the London Evening Standard swathed in fox furs and wafting in subtle but expensive scent. Charles Wintour (father of the more famous Dame Anna) was utterly smitten with the glamorous Gaia, and instructions would be issued to ensure her reportage was given splash treatment.

She was divine: the quintessence of ‘radical chic’. I couldn’t understand a word she wrote about the dastardly Mafia – it seemed to be translated from the Sicilian – but the ace page-designer Dick Garrett made it look great.

A TV company is shooting a drama documentary based on Julie Welch’s The Fleet Street Girls – the female scribes back in my prime – and they surely must include the charismatic Gaia.

As Mrs Mostyn-Owen, Gaia became Boris Johnson’s first mother-in-law when he married her daughter, Allegra, although she didn’t quite give him the Partito Comunista Italiano seal of approval. Boris certainly has had some interesting matres-in-law: perhaps, when he eventually retires, he should write a memoir about them.

In Juliet Nicolson’s fascinating social history Frostquake, she describes how Britain succumbed to the bitter winter of 1962/63 and when the thaw came woke up to a different world. Before the frost, it was still the culture of the repressive 1950s; afterwards, the liberated 1960s dawned. Everything had changed utterly.

Perhaps something similar – in impact, if not in character – will have happened to us, post-COVID. That is to say, as all gets back to normal, we will find much about our world has changed.

Possibly, in some ways, for the worse. We may have grown accustomed to being told what to do by ‘the authorities’. We may discover we have become more habituated to being regulated, invigilated, monitored, masked, sanitised, tested and tracked.

Yet on the personal side, I believe we will have learned much more about appreciation, and gratitude.

There’s an Irish saying – ‘You never miss the water till the well runs dry’ – and how much I now cherish what previously I took for granted. A journey by aeroplane has become as exciting an event as it was when I first experienced the thrill of flight aged 20. A trip to the theatre is now a major treat.

When invitations to a dinner or tea party started to appear again in the late summer, I might as well have been a debutante preparing for a ball. How thrilling!

To be free to travel, meet family and friends again – isn’t that just wonderful! I appreciate every moment and experience.

I rejoiced, in August, to see a long queue of people in jolly mood at London’s St Pancras Station, waiting to board the Eurostar for Paris: the opportunities of normal life were steadily returning. We’ll never look on such joys again with complacency.

Princesses these days are infected with the spirit of feminism, affirming their right to make their own choices. Princess Charlene of Monaco has spent the last five months in her native South Africa, leaving her husband Albert and twin children in Monte Carlo. She seems to have embraced her heritage – ‘I am an African at heart,’ she has said – and quite evidently prefers the great open veldt to the tiny principality that Somerset Maugham memorably called ‘a sunny place for shady people’.

What a contrast to her late mother-inlaw, Grace, who had to stay walled up dutifully in the Pink Palace, though she yearned to return to thespian pursuits.

Brexit, or perhaps COVID, has reduced my supply of Continental publications that follow the detailed doings of the Almanach de Gotha. So I am not as well informed as I used to be about Queen Mathilde of the Belgians, Tasmanian-born Crown Princess Mary of Denmark or Archduchess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg, who was once mooted as a bride for Prince Charles. Marie-Astrid was ruled out on account of being a Papist, although the Dutch King and Queen have worked out a compromise on this issue: Lutheranism formally prevails but Queen Maxima, Holland’s Catholic queen, is free to practise her own faith. Progressive royals!

If Ireland is reunited, the Republican tricolour will probably be abolished. A harp on a blue background (St Patrick’s original colour was blue, not green) has been suggested. It might have to feature a tiny Red Hand of Ulster emblem in the corner.

There’s currently much talk of a united Ireland, 100 years after partition. And yet there are still at least 97 ‘peace walls’ in Belfast, keeping warring tribes apart. Not a great augury for peace and unity.