Spectator Life Summer 2015

A R T / D E S I G N / I N V E S T M E N T / D R I N K / T R AV E L

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THE FEMINIST CULT TERRORISING OXFORD P.31

R AC H E L JOH N SON

T HOM A S H E A T H E RW I C K

ST E PH E N B AY L E Y

The laws of watching sport

The case for the Garden Bridge

The architecture collectors

N A N N Y WA R S Why stealing a friend’s nanny is worse than pinching her husband. By Cristina Odone

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E DI T OR ’S L E T T E R

Mary Poppins never tired of reminding her charges, ‘I shall stay until the winds change.’ The weather has rarely been choppier than in London today. While the Childcare Bill hopes to improve life for working parents everywhere, in the more delusional postcodes of west London, nannies are being fought over like limited-edition Birkin bags. Indeed, the price of a crocodile Birkin and a decent nanny are currently roughly interchangeable — but for how long can this last? Cristina Odone has written a highly entertaining dispatch from the front line of the ‘nanny wars’. Perhaps nanny poaching is the ultimate highclass problem?

Spectator Life is also delighted to have the Prime Minister’s photographer, Andrew Parsons, offering insights and unseen images of an election campaign that kept us guessing to the end.

Just to the east of Westminster, the landscape may be about to alter even more dramatically as designer Thomas Heatherwick joins the South Bank to a new ‘North Bank’ with his Garden Bridge. Despite criticism, the Garden Bridge Trust recently announced a bullish 1,000-day deadline for the project to be completed. Meeting Heatherwick in the cluttered Cabinet of Wonders that’s his King’s Cross HQ, I discovered a real challenge to the prevailing cult of clean lines. While critics rail against the bridge as a folly, looked at another way it represents a revolutionary moment for emotional intelligence in urban planning. I’m looking forward to taking my place on that leafy barricade.

Spectator Life spectator.co.uk/spectator-life Twitter @Spectator_LIFE Instagram @SpectatorLife Supplied free with the 13 June 2015 issue of The Spectator 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP Telephone 020 7961 0200 ISSN: 2050-2192

30 years TAG L I ATE L L E Silver, diamond and yellow gold rings

Chairman Andrew Neil Publisher Damian Thompson Editor Olivia Cole Deputy Editor Danielle Wall Columnists Harry Cole, Sam Neill. James Mumford is away Sub-editors Peter Robins, Victoria Lane, John Honderich, Katherine Whitbourn Design & Art Direction Design by St www.designbyst.com Group Commercial Director Melissa McAdden melissa@spectator.co.uk Head of Luxury Advertising Emily Glazebrook: emily@spectator.co.uk

Cassandra Goad 147 Sloane Street London SW1X 9BZ Tel: 020 7730 2202

cassandragoad.com

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C ON T R I B U T OR S

Wigmore Street W1 · Harrods SW1 · King’s Road SW10

+44 (0)20 7493 4444

Andrew Parsons is the co-founder of i-Images Picture Agency. He has been chronicling the life of David Cameron from behind the lens for the past ten years, capturing both world events and private moments.

From £7,500 to £125,000

Cristina Odone is a Daily Telegraph writer and director of communications at the Legatum Institute, an international think tank.

She broadcasts regularly and would be lost without a nanny for her daughter.

CLAUDIA 03

Rachel Johnson has been on national newspapers since the age of 23 and is the author of seven books. KP is on the left.

SLEEP BEAUTIFULLY The world’s most comfortable bed, hand made in London

savoirbeds.co.uk Emily Rhodes writes about books at Emilybooks, sells them at Daunt Books and is the inventor of Emily’s walking book club.

Countertenor Ieystn Davies can be seen at Glyndebourne this summer and in September will revive his West End role in Farinelli & the King.

London

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CONTENTS

15 47 31 61 C U LT U R E

STYLE

LIFE

T R AV E L

12. The Index Where to go and what to see in July, August and September

42. Get in with the in crowd Rachel Johnson’s guide to the sporting social season 44. Sam Neill The only sort of story that makes me cry

15. Margate’s new Dreamland Clover Stroud on a south coast resurgence

47. Buy to view Architecture collectors, by Stephen Bayley

18. Buy the book Investments you can read, by Emily Rhodes

52. Bubbles busted I hate champagne, says Mark Mason

20. Building bridges Thomas Heatherwick talks to Olivia Cole 26. Team Cameron behind the scenes Intimate snaps by Andrew Parsons, official photograper

55. Grape Britain Some English wine is quite nice, says Camilla Swift

31. A monstrous new regiment Feminist bullies are invading Oxford. By Damian Thompson

57. The Wish List Men’s watches to watch out for

35. Sloane dangers The Chelsea set has lost its sense of fun, says Harry Mount

61. Travel: Jamaica Olivia Cole discovers the island’s literary side

36. Harry Cole Sing if you’re glad to be Tory

64. Globe trotting Four truly great escapes

38. Nanny wars Cristina Odone confesses to trying to steal a ‘treasure’

66. One to watch Iestyn Davies on Thomas Dunford

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AU DR E Y H EPBUR N: PORTRAITS OF AN ICON National Portrait Gallery, from 2 July Still cameras loved her even more than the cine camera; all the evidence is here.

JUL

THEAKSTON’S OLD PECULIER CRIME WRITING F E S T I VA L Various venues, 16–19 July Whodunit? This year, those doing it include Lee Child, Sara Paretsky, and well-known crime novelist Eddie Izzard.

BAKKHAI Almeida Theatre, 23 July–19 September Euripedes at his most elemental, with Ben Whishaw as the vengeful Dionysos.

P E T E R PA N Royal Opera House, 24–25 July J.M. Barrie’s boy who never grew up begins another stage in his varied career, in a ‘family opera’

by Richard Ayres with libretto by the poet Lavinia Greenlaw.

A NUMBER Young Vic, from 4 July Caryl Churchill’s creepy clones are reproduced in London for the first time in ten years.

JAC K SON POLLOCK: BLIND SPOTS Tate Liverpool, until 18 October After those much-reproduced colourful drips came the ‘black pourings’: a sterner sort of abstraction that’s had many fewer public showings. This is the Tate’s richly endowed case for a reassessment.

AUG

THE INDEX

THE ASHES Various venues, from 8 July Things have changed since Australia beat England 5-0 last time. For a start, the Aussies are stronger… .

PORT ELIOT F E S T I VA L Cornwall, from 30 July This cute Cornish festival of comedy, music, food and writing is perhaps the only place where Alan Johnson will be sharing a bill with the Unthanks.

PROMS Various venues, throughout August to 12 September Highlights of the month’s Proms offerings include new work from James MacMillan and Sir András Schiff playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

HAMLET Barbican, from 5 August To be more precise, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet. That’s why you’re much too late to get a ticket.

But there’s a live screen relay in October — and if you want to get as close as possible, it’s even going to the Barbican’s own cinema.

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T H E M A N F ROM U.N.C .L .E .

Various cinemas, from 14 August In time, every fragment of your childhood will become a Hollywood blockbuster. Armie Hammer is the blond one. Henry Cavill is the suave one. Guy Ritchie, we’re afraid, is the director.

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POLLOCK: YELLOW ISLANDS 1952; AUDREY HEPBURN: BUD FRAKER, SABRINA PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1954; DAVID BYRNE: DANNY NORTH; AI WEIWEI: GAO YUAN

AUG

FILM4 SUMMER SCREEN Somerset House, 6–19 August Perhaps the most architecturally handsome open-air cinema in the country: this year it has Roman Holiday, The Graduate, Withnail and I and, for those who prefer their summer nights with a touch of chill, Silence of the Lambs.

E N D OF T H E ROA D F E S T I VA L Dorset, 4– 6 September A fantastic indie line-up includes Sufjan Stevens, Laura Marling and The War on Drugs.

L E ST W E FORGET Sadler’s Wells, 8–12 September Acclaimed first world war triptych from English National Ballet.

THE GLASS M E NAGE R I E Various venues, from 12 September Headlong, the company behind Enron and Chimerica, bring their brand of bold theatricality to Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough play.

K EVIN BRIDGES Hammersmith Apollo, 14–19 September The Scottish stand-up is one of the best and brightest of the panel show comics doing the rounds of the UK’s arenas.

EDI N BU RGH I N T ER NAT IONA L F E S T I VA L Various venues, 7–31 August Swerve the student drama and stand-up comedy of the Fringe and head to the EIF where you can catch Juliette Binoche in Antigone and new work from Canadian wizard of stagecraft Robert Lepage.

C OW E S W E E K Isle of Wight, 8–15 August The sailing world descends on the Isle of Wight for its annual jamboree.

D AV I D B Y R N E ’ S M E LT D OW N Southbank Centre, 17–30 August There’s one big surprise about the Southbank’s festival of musical genre-busting being handed to the former Talking Head and current world-pop philosopher: that he hadn’t done it years ago.

PURITY Released 1 September After Freedom comes Purity – the latest offering from Jonathan Franzen, the much-disputed and disputing heavyweight champion of American literature.

AI WEIWEI Royal Academy, from 19 September Artworks drawn from two decades of the trailblazing Chinese artist’s career, including several new large-scale installations.

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How Margate got its groove back Clover Stroud

POPPERFOTO/ GETTY

RETURN TO DR EAM L AN D

Arrive at Margate on the new high-speed train linking the international glitter of St Pancras to this distant stretch of the South Coast, and before you’ve even glimpsed the sea you’ll see Dreamland, Britain’s oldest amusement park, with a history as chequered as the town itself. It closed ten years ago this month. And its grand reopening is scheduled for next Friday.

Locals sometimes described it as the heartbeat of the town, because for a long time Dreamland dazzled. It first opened as a tearoom, the Hall by the Sea, in 1863, before being bought by circus impresario ‘Lord’ George Sanger in 1870. Today, the train arriving in Margate runs alongside the Grade II-­

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listed Gothic-style walls and rusty metal cages where Sanger kept his tigers and elephants. Margate was a coveted destination back then. Londoners came to enjoy the sea air and pour through the turnstiles of Dreamland, though the odd dark cloud still drifted over town. Soon after it opened, a local prostitute was killed by a Dreamland circus strong man, and Sanger himself was killed in a fight. The beach at Margate where Sanger once walked his tigers saw clashes between mods and rockers in the Sixties, and then between mods and skinheads in the Eighties.

As foreign travel got cheaper, Dreamland faced tougher competition from cheap package holidays.

By the 1980s, once-proud beachfront hotels and guesthouses housed social security claimants and asylum seekers. By the 1990s, Margate’s fortunes had really fallen and the fun shuddered to a halt. Dreamland rides were sold off, and the park closed. Those tourists who did bother to venture here saw a mangle of broken, rusting rides and boarded up candyfloss stalls.

Dreamland became a reminder of the fallen fortunes of the town around it.

Now, with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £18 million of private investment, Dreamland is being reborn. The wooden skeleton of the Grade II-listed scenic railway has risen once again above the site, an exact replica of the original which opened in 1919.

Above left: Dreamland in its former glory Above right: Dreamland forms part of Margate’s moody skyline Previous page: A young family plan their time in Margate, 1955

Tracey Emin has made two neon light pieces for Dreamland. Born and bred in Margate, she champions the town, which she calls ‘romantic, sexy and weird’

The famous revolving Wedgwood teacups and caterpillar rollercoaster have been restored, and there’s a new helter skelter. The listed roller-disco hall will glitter again and there’s plans to turn the 2,000-capacity ballroom, which once hosted the Who, the Rolling Stones and T. Rex, into a venue for high diving, circus, magic shows and theatre.

With his wife Geraldine and son Jack, Wayne Hemingway has taken on overall design of the park, bringing in recent experience of working on other rejuvenation projects in Bournemouth and Wembley. As well as the job of unifying the disparate aesthetic of rides spanning from the 1920s until the 1980s, ­HemingwayDesign has also planned out the music and even smells that are to be pumped out into the park for some of the rides.

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Above right: Dreamland’s ‘Hurricane Jets’ ride, restored from the 1950s Left: The Turner Contemporary led the way in Margate’s transformation

GB Pizza left Exmouth Market to open in Margate, and on Saturdays queues for their groovy canteen restaurant stretch down the seafront. Artists’ studios and cultural spaces like Limbo Arts, Crate Space and Zoe Murphy Studios are springing up in empty Georgian houses or disused electrical substations, since cheap space is something Margate has in abundance.

A newer, faster high-speed link into central London is promised for 2018, bringing next-door Ramsgate just 50 minutes from St Pancras, making Margate a sweat-free metropolitan commute.

The rejuvenation of Margate is part of a bigger ripple of gentrification along this stretch of coast. It started in Whitstable, whose fortunes are not just rising but fully risen. A clutch of excellent restaurants like Jojos,

Wheelers and the Windy Corner combined with seafront location and Regency architecture have hiked property prices up so far that many locals have cashed in and moved on. More boho and certainly more hippy, nearby Hastings is just out of commuter reach, although the art deco buildings and freewheeling life mean it’s a hipster’s paradise, and nearby St Leonards has gained the title Dalston-on-Sea. Yet for all that, poverty is still shockingly close to the surface. In Margate, just 11 per cent of the population have a professional qualification and unemployment is at around 20 per cent, much higher than the national average.

Walk up behind the hill in the Old Town, and the vintage boutiques quickly thin out, giving way to pawn shops and charity shops. Scores of teenage mothers push babies, plugged into dummies. Outside Wetherspoon’s, men with hard-bitten faces smoke over their morning pint of lager. Turner told Ruskin that ‘the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe’ and painted some of his most generous pictures there, but this is also where T.S. Eliot wrote sections of the most devastating, brilliant poem of the 20th century, ‘The Waste Land’. Today, Margate is holding its breath, hoping Dreamland can work its old magic and restore the fortunes of this remarkable seaside town.

TONY HOPEWELL; CARLOS DOMINGUEZ/ GETTY

Tracey Emin, born and bred in Margate, has also created two new neon light pieces especially for the park. She has always championed the town, a place she has described as ‘romantic, sexy and weird’.

Today the fortunes of Dreamland and Margate are woven together so tightly that the optimism and energy being poured into the amusement park is mirrored in the rejuvenation of the town. When the trust announced it was recruiting 250 staff for the park, the queues of applicants wound down the street. Some of the applicants had strong memories of working in the park before it closed, or brought photographs of themselves on rides with parents and grandparents.

Much of this archive material has been critical during the process of reimagining the site.

There’s no doubt that Margate’s on the up. The opening of the Turner Contemporary in 2011 gave the town an injection of cultural credibility, and in the compact Old Town, every street is dotted with trendy shops offering artisan coffee, vintage clothes or artfully distressed furniture. On the front, crystal chandeliers glitter above tables of well-coiffured ladies enjoying crab ravioli in the Sands Hotel with its heartstopping view across the bay. At weekends, local estate agents are kept busy by young families priced way, way out of the capital and hunting a fivebedroom Victorian semi that they can pick up for less than five times their salaries. The artisan pizza joint

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BU Y THE BO OK

offers two pieces of advice. First, buy the best possible copy of a book. This means a copy as close to the original publication as possible — first edition, first impression and with the original dust jacket. Dust jackets used to be considered worthless. When you bought a book, the seller would offer to remove its cover. This means that jackets can be extremely rare and, with our focus nowadays on a book’s appearance, they are highly prized. Peter Selley at Sotheby’s tells me that a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby without a dust jacket would go for something in the region of the low thousands, but a first edition with a dust jacket recently sold in New York for $350,000.

Second, rather than buying one book as an investment, build a whole collection around your interests. ‘A book is like a single stock; a library is like a portfolio,’ explains Douglas. He tells me that books about Alan Turing and his contemporaries are

First editions are lasting investments Emily Rhodes

A fine example of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ with its dust jacket intact recently sold for $350,000 in New York

As a bookseller, I’ve always thought that spending an alarmingly high proportion of my wages on books is a hazard of the job.

You wouldn’t put an alcoholic in charge of an off-licence or let a kid run a sweet shop, and yet here I am, chronically addicted to books, spending all day in an environment that feeds this illness with countless enticing treats and a staff discount. True, as addictions go, it could be worse, but I worry that instead of frittering away money on the contents of my bookshelves, I ought to be saving for sensible things like childcare or fixing our dilapidated roof.

It turns out, however, that I needn’t feel guilty, because spending money on books can be a means of earning money. It isn’t spending, it’s investing. It’s just that I’ve been investing in the wrong sort of books — cheap, mass-produced paperbacks instead of precious rare old things.

I do own a few rare books. Three years ago my mother instigated a tradition of buying a special book for my birthday. It began with a trip to Peter Harrington’s Chelsea premises, where we spent a heavenly hour browsing. The hour was purely gratuitous as I’d spotted the book I desired within five minutes, when I reached B and chanced upon a copy of Bowen’s Court by Elizabeth Bowen inscribed: ‘E.M. Forster from Elizabeth Bowen June 1942’.

Two of the books I’ve found most inspiring for my own novel-inprogress are Bowen’s Court and Forster’s Howards End, so to find them yoked together in this singular edition felt like fate.

I still can’t believe that Forster’s copy of Bowen’s Court is now my own. I look at the inscription and my imagination whirls with questions: how did Bowen present her book to Forster — did she post it, or give it to him over tea? Was it hot that day in June? Was she nervous as to what he’d make of it, and what did he make of it?

Did they discuss any favourite, or less favourite, passages? What were its neighbours on his bookshelf? Where did he like to read it — in an armchair, at the table, in bed? I love the story written

by Bowen in this book, but I love more the story of the thing itself, whispered by those few words of its inscription. This feeling of contact with its past is what makes the book so precious. A rare book is a lo-fi, yet uncannily effective, time-travelling device in a way that a common paperback and certainly an ebook are not.

So much for the pleasure, but what makes this financially sensible is that rare books tend to increase in value, although of course there is an element of risk. Adam Douglas at Peter Harrington

worth far more than they were a decade ago, not because of Benedict Cumberbatch, but because people who made their money in the digital revolution want to collect the books of their heroes.

Ed Maggs of Maggs Bros stresses the financial risk that comes with our changing tastes. ‘Quite simply there are no “blue-chip” books.

D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and George Bernard Shaw have all gone down in value considerably over the past 20 years — there is a political seriousness about them which doesn’t ring true today.’

Contemporary authors are riskier still, as it’s so hard to tell whose reputation will continue to flourish and who will be consigned to the margins of literary history. I ask Selley which of today’s authors would make a sound investment. ‘I can only guess,’ he says, ‘but the new vogue for writing about the vanishing English countryside by writers like Robert Macfarlane is an interesting phenomenon, and I’d also consider the more experimental novels — Ali Smith’s recent How To Be Both is a good example.’

Of course the real problem with making money by collecting books is that to get the cash, you have to sell. ‘Collectors often hold on to a few favourites,’ Adam Douglas says, ‘and often the sellers aren’t the collectors themselves, but inheritors.’ Indeed, some friends of mine made a living for a while by selling off a library they inherited, book by book, on Abebooks.com.

My most recent birthday book is a first edition of All Passion Spent, Vita Sackville-West’s fictional counterpart to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own — chosen to celebrate the recent birth of my daughter Vita. I look at the book on my shelf and feel all the thrill that comes with owning this precious thing, bought at such a special moment in my life, and know that I will never be able to sell it. When I think about handing it on to Vita, however, I feel the reassuring weight of having invested in something sensible. I hope she will inherit a book precious for its memories, and also a little literary nest egg if needs be.

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Let’s build bridges The actress and the designer have been working on the project for 15 years. Their critics claim there are better ways of spending £175 million. London needs ­ oubters real bridges. Boris Johnson accuses the d of having ‘a Taleban-like hatred of beauty’. The Mayor of London seems enchanted by Heatherwick (who also designed the ‘Boris Bus’, inspired by the capital’s hopon, hop-off Routemasters).

Johnson has pledged £30 million of public money for the bridge. The Chancellor has matched that. In all, £127 million has been pledged. So only £48 million to go. Surely a nation obsessed with gardening can find that? So far the signs are encouraging. Private money is coming forward. Glencore, the international mining company, has given an undisclosed sum towards the cost of the copper-nickel alloy that will coat the bridge ‘like a protective skin’.

Heatherwick is a puckish 45-year-old whose foppish waistcoats reflect the eccentricity of his ideas.

But he is also driven and ambitious. He needs to be.

Debate over the bridge seems to be getting louder, but this hasn’t dented Heatherwick’s fantastical ­a mbitions. He describes the Garden Bridge as a pro-

Give Thomas Heatherwick £175 million and he will turn London into Venice Olivia Cole Fast-forward a few years. Picture the scene. Before the decade is out you could be strolling across or lingering on Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge, which, if it materialises, will take flight from the brutalist South Bank of the Thames and land on the north side at ­Temple underground station.

Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge is a project for a global city in its prime — a £175 million folly designed to be a tranquil place to walk, meander and think. Led by their cheerleader Joanna Lumley, who is credited with the idea, the bridge’s advocates cite the successful New York High Line park — planted on an abandoned elevated freight line — as an example of how an ­u nusual urban garden that’s free to the public can become a city signature.

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ject for ‘a thousand years’. Isn’t that far-fetched? Not when you consider his inspiration. ‘Venice,’ he says, wide-eyed: ‘the most beautiful and extraordinary place on the planet. And it’s preposterous — the idea of building a city on water. But that’s why we love it, because it’s incredible.’

Heatherwick speaks gently about making his bridge ‘a place where you can linger and have a conversation with someone or have an idea’.

The Garden Bridge is planned as architecture that chimes with its surroundings — a green retort to the unloved concrete of the South Bank and, looking east, the modernist excesses all over the skyline of the City.

Heatherwick finds clean lines ‘gross’ and endless perfectly manufactured glass ‘soulless’. His aim is to change attitudes to urban planning all over the world. ‘It gives me the creeps when I see a frame for a building going up and recognise the architect,’ he has said. ‘You shouldn’t know who a project is by.’ He seems

Above: the proposed Garden Bridge Below: the Olympic Cauldron

to regard the glass-and-steel structures that tower over modern cities as the work of dinosaurs, and says he hates the word ‘procurement’.

On this platform, Heatherwick Studios is winning worldwide commissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The designer has talked Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg into backing a floating island on the Hudson, Pier 55, at a cost of £80 million. Then there’s the new Google headquarters in California.

And South Africa’s first museum of contemporary African art.

Heatherwick likes to talk about the sense of proportion, sensitivity and even love which he thinks Victorian designers such as Brunel had, but which we have lost. ‘It’s part of the modern sensibility to appear to make it sound like those are unnecessary things,’ he argues. The lonelier our lives become, perhaps, the more his ideas strike a chord.

His Learning Hub in Singapore challenges the dig-

London’s Garden Bridge will be ‘a place you can linger and have a conversation with someone, or have an idea’

ital isolation of the modern student by abandoning corridors and teaching rooms, encouraging students and teachers to collide and mingle. Yet his own HQ, where he oversees 150 designers and architects, is an unprepossessing space under a Travelodge in King’s Cross.

Projects take shape amid the clutter of his team’s working day, in between the banana skins and packets of chocolate ­biscuits. There is none of the design fascism you find in the minimalist studios of his rivals.

So who is this arriviste presenting such a challenge to the prevailing fashion for ‘slickness’ and ‘clean lines’? Heatherwick grew up in Wood Green and 22

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s­ tudied design at Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art in London (his master’s degree is in furniture design). Here he attracted the attention of his first patron, Terence Conran. At his RCA degree show in 1994, potential clients were presented with icecreams. When they’d eaten them, his name and phone number were on the lolly sticks. No wonder he’s good at winning commissions.

His breakout year was 2012. His Olympic cauldron was a show-stopper, swiftly followed by the Boris Buses, which he talks of as though they are urban pleasure steamers. Bus designers are not amused: the design doesn’t have the ‘modularity’ needed for the buses to be sold internationally, so their only market is London, which makes them hugely expensive.

Following in the footsteps of architects such as Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid, Heather­w ick is also at work on a cancer care centre in Leeds, commissioned by the charity Maggie’s.

The Maggie’s cause chimes with the Heatherwick approach, which is to react against institutionalised building. He likes to design in neglected ‘gaps’ — grimy London buses, the Thames (regarded for centuries as a dirty eyesore), or hospitals. As he says, ‘­Historically, in the world of architecture enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a clichéd idea of culture.’

By contrast, ‘When you think about the worst places humans come into contact with, they are often our health environments.’ Maggie’s was founded by the architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who found, while being treated for breast cancer, that the awful physical surroundings made her pain, worry and sense of alienation even worse.

Heatherwick’s eloquence helps sell his ideas. His waistcoats and his mop of curls (combined with the ­lyrical way he discusses the most prosaic of subjects — concrete, for example, or buses) give him a slight air of Willy Wonka presiding over his dream factory. As a

Above: Heatherwick’s Learning Hub in Singapore

result, Heatherwick now has something of a cult ­following.

For those who refuse to buy into this, however, there are questions. Last year the Architects’ Journal used the Freedom of Information Act to extract previously withheld details about the Garden Bridge design competition. It found that Heatherwick was awarded the highest marks for design experience — despite the fact that he’d completed only two projects of comparable size.

The Mayor is accused of cronyism, pushing through a pet project of a friend (Lumley) by his favourite designer (Heatherwick) with no regard for process.

Ask Heatherwick about this and you get a flash of the drive that he surely must possess, for all his puckishness, to have come so far, so fast.

‘Every single major project in London had people trying to stop it. I think that human nature is scared of change and justifies it in all sort of ways,’ he says. ­P rojects such as the Garden Bridge create ‘enormous fear and resistance — vociferous resistance’.

But, he says, the mood changes once one of these projects is finished. ‘If there were ever the question of it being taken away, [public sentiment] suddenly switches the other way, and there’s enormous desire to retain those things. Particularly when something has spirit and character.’ But in the meantime, Heatherwick isn’t surprised by the naysayers and the rumours about a ‘cabal’: ‘It’s not unexpected that there would be resistance, looking for every possible way to create friction.’

The Garden Bridge is based on the idea that the best cities are ones with maximum ‘walkability’ and are places where city-dwellers (those lonely students with their Kindles and iPads, for instance) can interact with each other. It’s a highly romantic idea — a folly whose purpose, if there is one, is to encourage purposelessness. Heatherwick envisages daydreams, proposals and writing taking shape on his creation, rather than soliciting or mugging.

Heatherwick’s optimistic vision of improvement encompasses fantasy, imperfection and quirkiness. His mother, Stefany Tomalin, used to run a jewellery shop in the Portobello Road. ‘When it closed, I met so many people who said they spent hours in there.’ At the time, he tells me, the ‘little mini designer’ in him was obsessed with minimalism and loathed the clutter of The Bead Shop, as it was called. After talking to its customers, he changed his mind: ‘I thought, note to self, I was wrong about that.’

Heatherwick talks as if he’s forcing a clash of aesthetic worldviews, between doctrinaire functionality and the human imagination. But with £48 million still to find, and with resistance becoming more vocal, he will need all of the Heatherwick magic — the steeliness as well as the idealism — to pull this one off.

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01/06/2015 12:17

CULTURE

Snap election Andrew Parsons, official photographer to the Tory campaign, says he’s spent so much time with the Camerons that they’ve got used to him ‘hanging around’.

Spectator Life has the stories behind some of his best pictures

P OW ER L I F T I NG

One of the features of this election was the selfie. When supporters met their party leader, they wanted one taken. It led David Cameron to complain, in a Spectator interview, that ‘It sometimes makes part of the process of politics quite difficult. Everyone wants to have a selfie rather than a conversation.’

But when the Prime Minister looks back on his election victory, he won’t be using snatched shots taken on mobile phones. Instead, he’ll be leafing through the pictures taken by the campaign’s official photographer, Andrew Parsons.

Parsons and Cameron know each other well — he’s been photographing them for the past 10 years. Parsons says that after this length of time the Camerons and their aides ‘get used to you hanging around’. The result is a strikingly natural set of photographs of what life was like on the campaign trail for the Prime Minister.

As Parsons framed his shots he had no idea what the election result would be. ‘You had to look for every emotion, as you didn’t know which way it was going to go,’ he tells Spectator Life. He says that the importance of what he had photographed only sank in as he drove in the convoy that followed Cameron from his count in Witney to London. As the sun rose over the City, it dawned on him that he ‘had photographed history’. Here is the story of the election as told through Parsons’s pictures.

With the exit poll in, Cameron and his team headed to the Windrush leisure centre in Witney to await the result in the P rime M inister’s own constituency.

As they waited backstage in a room crammed full of gym equipment, the night got better and better for the Conservatives.

Here, Samantha Cameron and David Cameron celebrate another seat going blue and confirmation that they wouldn’t be moving house in the morning.

I N T H E RU N N I NG

David Cameron now jokes that he’d like to sue the opinion pollsters for his ulcers. But the stress of a general election campaign can eat away at a politician. So Cameron tried to take time out to exercise, to run off the stress. Here we see him pounding through Hyde Park after a morning spent launching his party’s election manifesto.

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T H E GR E AT DE BAT E

The question of what format the TV debates should take had dominated the build-up to the campaign. Here Cameron, his closest political ally George Osborne and Craig Oliver (seated), the communications director and former BBC man who had brokered the debate deal, make lastminute preparations before the one sevenway leaders’ debate.

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CULTURE

C OR R I DOR S OF P OW ER

With the polls refusing to budge, the launch of the Conservative manifesto in the swing seat of South Swindon took on particular importance. In this shot, we see Cameron composing his thoughts backstage before delivering a speech promising a ‘good life’ for voters under the Conservatives.

I N N ER C I RC L E

With only seven days of the campaign left, Cameron sits huddled with his most senior aides. In the far left hand corner is the Conservatives’ all-powerful Australian campaign director, Lynton Crosby; in the magenta trousers is his business partner, the pollster Mark Textor. To Cameron’s left is Liz Sugg, who ran his campaign tour, and next to George Osborne is Ameet Gill, who masterminded the election ‘grid’ that determined which announcements were made when. To his left is Stephen Gilbert, whose in-depth knowledge of every target seat was vital to the Tory election effort.

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01/06/2015 15:56

A BU L L I NGD ON F OR F E M I N I ST S Meet the power-crazed feminists stalking Oxford

ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIE JONES

Damian Thompson

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LIFE

We’re at the tail end of Trinity term at Oxford, when the university finally begins to look like the ‘city of dreaming spires’ depicted in the postcards. The dismal weather cheers up; the quadrangles are soaked in sunlight; and the students — just about to leave for the summer — grab these precious few weeks to do Oxfordy things like punting and slurping Pimm’s.

Even the swots and the lefties are filled with the spirit of Brideshead. Parties spring up on every available lawn; the chatter of gossip and teasing grows louder and louder until the sun goes down, people start throwing up and the college authorities herd the revellers on to the street.

But this year a group of undergraduates — mostly women — will be shunning all this. They will be staying in their college rooms, fingers flying across their keyboards as they scowl at the screen. They are the hard core of a feminist cult that has gripped Oxford and makes life miserable for hundreds of undergraduates across the university. The cult uses Facebook to snoop on students who aren’t ‘proper’ feminists.

It tries to force young women to use its extreme rhetoric and denounces them if they don’t.

Its digital tirades can poison college life. One young woman told me that new friends she’d made at Oxford suddenly shunned her in the dining hall after the word went out that she held ‘incorrect’ views on women’s rights. (She was so worried about repercussions that she asked me not to mention which area of women’s rights she felt strongly about.)

I’m going to call the cult ‘Country Living’. That’s not quite accurate: it’s actually spelled without the ‘o’, a gynaecological pun that’s the only evidence of a sense of humour you’ll find among its leaders. I ­reckon calling it Country Living will make them cross. Which, to be fair, is not difficult. These l­asses are very, very cross all the time. If there was an Oxford blue for taking offence, they’d be champions.

Country Living is an internet cult that polices behaviour both online and offline. Its manifesto can be read by anyone who visits its page on the blogging platform Tumblr, which is mocked up to look like a 1970s student magazine. Here we learn that anyone can become a C-word, which is a badge of honour, not a term of abuse. Those four letters have been ‘reclaimed’ by the group. (Like feminists everywhere, Country Living does a lot of reclaiming.)

But to earn this honour you must pass tests as severe as the binge-drinking initiation rituals of an all-male Oxford dining society. You must promise to ‘accept that gender is a social construction and embrace its fluidity’. You must ‘recognise your place and privilege within intersectionality’.

And if you fail to do these things, Country Living wants to know. It has spies all over Oxford. They’re not necessarily ‘members’ of the group — as with many religious cults, it’s not clear who is and isn’t a member, and fellow-travellers are often the most snoopy zealots.

A student can be chatting with friends in the Missing Bean, an espresso bar in quaint Turl Street, and say something ‘problematic’ — the Country Living buzzword, meaning anything that deviates from its rigid feminist doctrine, obsessed with transsexual rights.

The Country ladies are ferocious earwiggers, and if the student is on the cult’s radar, the remark will find its way back to HQ. Which, bizarrely, is not an office but a Facebook group.

This is where Country Living rules on the correct ideological approach to any current issue. Its Facebook pages are designed as a ‘safe space’ for feminists — meaning an unsafe space for anyone who deviates from the line. As with many sectarian outfits, the smaller the deviation, the bigger the hissy fit. ‘The ultimate crime is not being a Tory man, but being the wrong sort of feminist,’ explains one woman student who, like everyone I talked to, asked not to be named.

‘Problematic’ is the Country Living buzzword, meaning anything that deviates from its rigid feminist doctrine, obsessed with transsexual rights

The Country set love shutting down debates on their pages. Just after the general election, whose result came as a nasty shock to them, their Facebook administrator Shaina Yang announced that ‘I can’t allow these discussions [about the Tory victory] to continue until we release a clarified statement of what CL rules say is okay and isn’t okay on this topic.’ No wonder that, according to a survey by the Oxford Tab newspaper, a third of Country Living Facebook members were ‘too nervous’ to post in the group.

Such nervousness isn’t confined to Facebook.

‘The influence of CL goes way beyond its membership,’ says one male undergraduate. ‘Girls who come up to Oxford as mild feminists pick up the message that they have to take offence at anything that might be considered misogynistic. So boys have to monitor their own language, pretend to be worked up about 32

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administrators of ‘­Facebook-stalking members’ profiles’ to determine whether they were ‘legit feminists’.

She also accused the group of spreading a version of politically correct racism. People of mixed race — like herself — felt they were being ‘erased’ because they didn’t fit neatly into an ethnic category. She wrote: ‘Being half Latino, whenever I’ve become involved with threads discussing race, I’ve been accused of “passing privilege” and have been instructed to identify as white when talking to people of colour.’

Imagine if allegations of racial bullying were made against a Tory drinking club. The Oxford University authorities would investigate immediately. But Country Living is left-wing, so it is left alone.

Fortunately the group is unstable and beginning to divide into factions. Ordinary undergraduates are finally summoning up the nerve to tease them.

The chances are that Country Living — like thousands of cults throughout history — will tear itself apart in an orgy of name-calling, finger-pointing and accusations of heresy. But not before its fanatics have succeeded in spoiling university life for other students — and themselves.

trans issues, if they’re to stand any chance of getting laid.’ Something similar happened during the early Seventies heyday of old-style feminism, when guys would denounce patriarchy in order to get laid. But they didn’t have an internet Stasi to worry about.

Adds another student: ‘You see members of the college rugby club glancing around anxiously to see if there are any women present before they can tell a joke. Ironically, they’re the ones who need a safe space.’ I ask him how he can tell the difference ­ ountry sympathisers and the hard core. between C ‘Weirdly dyed hair is one clue,’ he says. ‘But a better one is “problematic”. The hard core insert it into practically every sentence.’

All this is Oxford at its worst. The university has always been a playground for egomaniacs and control freaks, unlike milder, more studious Cambridge.

Although there are Country members in other universities, its origins are no accident.

‘We insist that grammar and spelling are elitist and don’t matter because of a hundred years of linguistic study showing that. When people who insist on hyper-patriotism get language wrong, we use the errors in their language to suggest they aren’t qualified to judge complex matters.’ That’s a comment by one Alyson Cruise on a financial website, bearing the same photograph as the Country Facebook admin Alyson Cruise, a trans woman at St Catherine’s College (who didn’t respond when I contacted her).

If they’re the same person, then it’s bit rich of Cruise to judge errors in language, since her own grasp of syntax on Facebook is pretty rudimentary. But the urge to correct the grammar of the lower orders is very Oxonian. No other university is so intellectually snobbish.

Even the Bullingdon Club is at times — look at the proportion of Firsts and future power brokers among its members. Country Living would hate the comparison, but they and the Bullers are both elitist, secretive and enjoy ridiculing people on the basis of linguistic clues.

Among the Oxford social elite, letting slip a lower-middle-class word such as ‘lounge’ is what the hyper-feminists would call ‘problematic’. ‘I’d love to see a fights between CL and the Bullingdon,’ muses a student.

‘The feminists would scratch their eyes out before they’d thrown their first chair.’

Unlike the 235-year-old Bullingdon, ­h owever, ­C ountry Living is unlikely to become a venerable Oxford institution. A backlash is under way. ­L ouisa Manning, an ex-member, has broken ranks to denounce its ‘patronising, self-righteous tone’ — and revealed that as a mixed-race woman, she had been instructed by the group ‘to identify as white when talking to people of colour’. She also accused the

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SL OA N E DA N GE R S

tions. ‘Sloanes were trained to laugh all the time, even if they couldn’t contribute,’ says Killen. The originals were Sloanes down to their fingertips — fingertips caked in mud after a morning’s weeding round the staddle stones in the rain. They never had to think about their Sloaniness, unlike that poor boy staring into the window in Jermyn Street. Like natural footballers who kick a ball perfectly, the Sloane innately knew how to write enough to reach the second page of a thank-you letter; they intuited the exact moment to vom on the dance floor during ‘I Will Survive’.

‘You can’t remake the way people see the world,’ says York.

‘There was an innocence to the original. The Made in Chelsea Sloane is much more knowing. And the modern version is much better off. Money has triumphed — and there’s now a money snobbery of the most crass kind. Sloanes were never really the very rich toffs. And you have to be very rich now to buy the things Sloanes could afford then.’ One of the eye-popping things about The

The new Chelsea set try very hard to dress like the old one, but they are richer, more knowing, harder working and less sincere Harry Mount

The original Sloanes weren’t geniuses; in fact, they were suspicious of dangerous things like books and art galleries

Ann Barr — who created the Sloane Ranger with Peter York in 1982 — died in May at the age of 85. But the co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook lived long enough to see the birth of a sad new imitation: the Pretend Sloane. They come in many shapes and sizes, but you can spot the PS everywhere. One such is that awkward, plump boy in the bowler hat admiring the collars in Jermyn Street shop windows and wondering which one to buy, or hovering nervously in his tweeds outside the East India Club. And then there are the sleeker members of the PS tribe: the Made in Chelsea Sloanes — with long, thick hair (for both sexes), equally at ease in New York, the Bahamas and Klosters, but educated at Britain’s most expensive schools. The PS worships at the battered brogues of the original Sloane. They imitate their clothes: Barbours, tailored suits, cords. But the PS drawls the Queen’s English where the original Sloane brayed his; an infinitesimal difference to most, but glaring to any contemporary Henry Higgins.

In their hearts and souls, there is a yawning gulf between the original Sloane and Sloane 2.0. Sequels lose quality — The Godfather Part II notwithstanding — and the rule applies to Sloanes.

Like most imitations, they try too hard. They have carefully picked and chosen the aspects of Sloanedom they worship: Eton, yes; dog hair on the pillow, no. Quilted waistcoat, yes; wearing your boyfriend’s frayed M&S Tattersall check shirt, no way.

The PS may have many outward Sloane signifiers, in accent and appearance. But they don’t possess the essential Sloaniness of Sloanes ­— an amalgam of contradictory qualities: confident, awkward, energetic, idle, crazily over-spending, rackety and cheeseparing, outrageously funny, appallingly offensive, keen on beautiful suits and gorilla suits. As Barr and York pointed out, contradiction was all: ‘Cry when you sing carols; do not cry at funerals,’ advised The Sloane Ranger Handbook.

Sloanes certainly weren’t geniuses; in fact, they were suspicious of dangerous things like books and art galleries. ‘Lots of them were members of Densa,’ says writer and social commentator Mary Killen. ‘They were emotional oafs; dull but loyal — the sort of friends who’d visit you in jail, the ones you’d want at your deathbed. They might have been interchangeable but they were a good sort.’

Their teasing, contradictory humour — combined with laughing at each other’s jokes loudly — was bred into them over genera-

Sloane Ranger Handbook is how comparatively cheap everything was in 1982. Eton was £1,260 a term, or ‘half’; it’s now £11,478.

Secretaries and nannies lived in rambling Chelsea houses; university was Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin or Sandhurst.

The PS now has to work much harder to pay for those vastly inflated house prices and school fees.

No wonder Henry and Caroline could stay up till dawn at dinner parties, hoovering up the Château Paintstripper and shovelling down the banoffee pie. There was no pressing need to get up in the morning. And then came the Big Bang, reforming the Stock Exchange, in 1986 — and Sloanes in the City got a rude awakening.

Literally. Before the Big Bang the first train of the morning left Haslemere, Surrey — albeit not a Sloane habitat — at 7.15. After the Big Bang, British Rail laid on an extra train, at 6.44 a.m. It now leaves at 5.26 a.m. Small wonder, then, that Mr and Mrs PS now leave dinner parties at 11 on the dot, and stick to the Badoit.

Peter York neatly captures the gulf between the two worlds in the tale of an original Sloane’s daughter who goes to a glittering children’s party at a PS’s shimmering megaschloss in Chelsea.

There the little girl is surrounded by the offspring of the hedgies who slave from dawn till well after dusk to maintain the modern PS lifestyle. When the original Sloane — unshaven, hung over, untroubled by strenuous employment — picks up his daughter from the party in his old, rusty Volvo, she asks him, ‘Daddy, are you lazy?’ Yes is the answer. But Daddy also belonged to a halfawful, half-glorious world of prelapsarian Sloaniness that is now one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Harry Mount’s Odyssey – Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus is published by Bloomsbury in July.

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LIFE

HARRY COLE

Pro-gay and appealing to ethnic minorities, Conservatives are suddenly socially acceptable

Time for Tories to come out out for Cameron in 2010. So used to being attacked for her lukewarm Conservatism, Emin thought I must be taking the piss.

Our national treasure was not alone in being sensitive. By the time I had made my position clear and she had stopped shouting, there seemed little point in continuing the conversation.

Our national treasure was not alone in being sensitive, but it feels different now.

Labour fought on solid lefty ground and were thumped. The Liberals were totally annihilated. If you broadly supported what the coalition had achieved, then what on earth was the point of voting Liberal Democrat?

It feels as if the right are finally getting the credit that they deserve for being, well, right. From the cash-rich fluttering pensioners to the rahs of Sussex, suddenly wearing one’s Tory loyalty on one’s sleeve is socially acceptable. Anecdotal data backs this up: vaguely right-wing posts on social media that once spelled social ostracism are now greeted with a flurry of likes, retweets and shares.

More serious pieces of election analysis will be written, but one thing that cannot be ignored is the gurning gift that was Ed Miliband, who made it impossible

I realised that the Tories were going to thump it while getting stuck into the champers at a wedding the weekend before polling day. Old friends from university barely let the bride and groom pick the confetti from their hair before collaring me: ‘Miliband can’t seriously win? I mean, come on! What are you doing to stop him, darling?’

It was clear that something had changed.

This was the same crowd that once looked at me as if I’d publicly admitted a penchant for sodomising livestock when I openly discussed my political allegiances during our student days. While I always presumed they were ‘small c’ conservatives — shy Tories — with a smattering of champagne socialists and a solitary Lib Dem, these things were never talked about. There has been the odd Facebook status pushing the latest ‘clicktivist’ fad or harrumphing about the right to shred foxes from the more rural types, but all in all most of the people I spent my formative years with couldn’t give a crap about politics, let alone the fortunes of the Conservative party. Or so I thought until the wedding.

Returning to the office on that Monday — and reporting this clear groundswell of support for Dave — I was told I was talking crazy and to look at the polls. I wish I had had the balls, and access to capital, of that Scottish pensioner who walked away with a quarter of a million after sticking £30,000 on a Tory majority that week.

Fools regret.

It has not always been this easy, though.

At a late-night luvvie bash a few years ago I got into a drunken row with Tracey Emin when trying to subtly praise her for coming

Ed Miliband made it impossible to support Labour and retain any semblance of normality.

His legacy is that he ruined the left’s entitlement to cool

to support Labour and retain any semblance of normality. His legacy, and we are being kind in affording him one, is that he ruined the left’s entitlement to cool.

Yet something else has happened, too.

Having attended Tory party conferences for nearly a decade, I’ve noticed a shift in recent years. Yes, a vast swathe of the colonels and the blue-rinse brigade have croaked it, but that slightly unpleasant frothier fringe of the party has disappeared too, presumably jumping ship to Ukip. The active party base is younger, darker, more metropolitan and certainly more tolerant.

‘It’s always been a real problem for me because of the stigma it’s carried,’ bleats delusional Ivan Massow. ‘It was harder coming out as Conservative than as gay.’

The entrepreneur found it so hard that he defected to Labour, but is now back in the Tories and running for mayor.

The prophets of doom said gay marriage would send Cameron to political oblivion, having lost older core activists. If anything, the opposite came true. In one fell swoop Downing Street enabled the 6 per cent of voters who are gay a proper choice at the election. While many Tory activists did jump to Ukip, the policy opened up the party to previously unreachable voters.

The million-strong increase in ethnicminority Tory voters cannot be ignored, either. It’s been a long road to shed that nasty party image, and it’s increasingly clear that the public are noticing.

When a paper like the Independent feels able to endorse Cameron, things really have changed. So no more of this shy Tory nonsense. Out and proud, please.

Hi. My name is Harry, and I voted Tory.

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LIFE

The nanny wars Since the arrival of the oligarchs the battle to secure the right childminder has gone nuclear Cristina Odone

finding a Premier Cru nanny, a ‘treasure’, has become a nightmare for the English upper middle classes.

The Sloanes are having to move down the hierarchy of nannies — from the legendary Norland Nannies to less experienced English girls; from the latter to Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans; and, if money is really tight, to Filipinas. If you think there’s casual racism at work here, you may have a point.

Some ‘ladies who lunch’ have cast aside everything they’ve been taught about moral rectitude at boarding school and set about trying to poach each other’s nannies. But I’m in no position to preach.

I was a nanny thief. Or I would have been if I hadn’t been caught. When I was still pregnant, I lured a friend’s cherished sixtysomething nanny to a restaurant. Over lunch I rather meanly pointed out that her ‘girls’ were now in their teens and perfectly capable of looking after themselves. Then, more desperately, that I’d give her the best bedroom in the house. Nanny blinked, looked tearful, and said she’d have a think.

I nstead, she promptly infor med my f r iend of my treachery. Nanny remained staunchly loyal to her employer.

My pregnancy unleashed a primitive craving. The strength of my yearning left me dizzy: a nanny, I wanted a nanny!

I worked full time, and couldn’t conceive of giving up my riveting professional life. But I also had no intention of having a succession of feckless au pairs raise my baby, or of parking my child at the local crèche.

I’d read ‘attachment theory’ and was convinced my child would turn feral without continuous nurturing to replace working mummy.

I kept meeting women who swore by their nannies — dignified women d’un certain âge who hovered lovingly over their charges from dawn till dusk, from Mayfair to Mustique. They were the ones who enforced bedtimes and showed up at the school concert. Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece’s five children had a designated nanny each, I was told in awed tones.

For these rich ladies, upmarket nannies were pearls of great price, worth selling your actual pearls for.

My less well-off friends wanted them, too. But there was a problem. The Nanny Wars were beginning.

Now they are in full swing. The flood of Russian, Arab and Chinese plutocrats into London means that 38

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ILLUSTRATION BY NATHALIE LEES

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LIFE I should have known she would. High-end nannies see themselves as members of their employer’s clan.

Until recently the grander ones took on the family name, too: the nanny to two generations of Earls of Dartmouth was known as Nanny Dartmouth. Until recently, these women provided a loving presence for their charges while mummy remained a distant figure.

Sir Max Hastings remembers his beloved nanny showing him into the drawing room, where his mother was sitting. When little Max burst into tears, the nanny apologised: ‘I’m so sorry, madam, he only does this with strangers.’

Rich parents are more hands-on these days, but nannies are still passed on like the family jewels. Viscount Linley and his wife Serena hired Prince Wil-

One ex-Norland nanny was warned during her training to be careful of foreign social climbers who insisted that she wear her brown uniform. It’s a sign that they only want a nanny as a status symbol.

‘Explain that wearing the uniform makes their children kidnap targets,’ she was told.

Another problem is that many Arabs, Chinese and Russians don’t speak English. A British nanny with a working knowledge of one of these languages can more or less name her own price.

But there aren’t many of those around. The Little Ones London agency, spotting a gap in the market, supplies bilingual nannies and promises their employees’ ‘discretion’. This is crucial to some Russian parents, who throw parties where trophy English celebs gobble Beluga from sculpted ice boats. A rogue nanny could make a fortune from the gossip columns.

And this brings us to a delicate question. According to the nanny grapevine, a few oligarchs (not the vast majority) think hiring a certain sort of nanny grants them droit du seigneur. Says a source in the business: ‘Oleg from Omsk isn’t going to spend 60 grand a year — that’s including all the extras, including use of car — on a Plain Jane in sensible shoes. Even if his hands don’t wander he wants to feast his eyes — and bawl out the poor girl every time she puts a foot wrong.’

Max Hastings remembers his nanny showing him into the drawing room where his mother was sitting. When he burst into tears, his nanny apologised: ‘I’m so sorry, your ladyship, he only does this with strangers’ liam’s old nanny, Jessie Webb, for their children. They then lent her to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to look after Baby George until a permanent nanny was appointed.

Miss Webb’s transition from one royal household to another was amicable, unlike the bitter quarrels over nannies that have turned swathes of South Kensington and certain country estates into battlefields.

It happens on the other side of the Atlantic, too.

Anglophile Americans are keen to press their progeny into a Downton cookie-cutter. One website, Modern Mom, asked recently: ‘What’s worse: stealing another woman’s nanny or sleeping with her husband?’

The answer for many busy women is stealing the nanny. She takes care of all that is dull and gross in child-rearing. She is the one to proffer (and then empty) the bag for car sickness; listen to the six-yearold torture the bassoon; bleach the Ribena out of the Rachel Riley sundress.

But a nanny does more than relieve parents of tiresome duties. She confirms their status. Enter the oligarchs, who love the idea of an old-style nanny in a prim uniform barking at the progeny to keep their elbows off the table. As one PR guru advised a Russian show-off, ‘Don’t buy a football club, get your children a nanny. That’s real class.’

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There was a time when a Marlborough-educated Army officer living in South Kensington could promise his wife a Norland nanny (or something similar).

Today he’s more likely to live in Battersea and if he has £50,000 to spare, he’d rather spend it on renovating the cottage in Wiltshire.

The next step down is to go for English-speaking girls from ‘the colonies’. The more snobbish parents avoid the term ‘au pair’, though that is what they are.

An Australian friend tells me: ‘Your typical Aussie girl thinks the idea of being a nanny is ridiculous. But she’ll go along with it in return for the cheap accommodation and free holidays in Europe. I even knew one nanny who had a cash-in-hand arrangement that allowed her to sign on in the UK.’ I don’t take such a cynical view. The Aussie and Kiwi nannies I’ve met are breezily cheerful and practical — far more likely to know how to change the wheel on a car than Miss Poppins.

There are other options. An agency called Manny Poppins offers CRB-checked male nannies who tend to be good at sport. To quote GQ magazine, what could be more appealing for a mother than ‘someone who will not only make the children’s macaroni and help with homework, but teach them football and fight off any muggers?’

Then there’s the humble and gentle Filipina, favoured by well-off liberals who rhapsodise about the ‘child-centred culture in the Philippines’. Though that’s not the only consideration. To quote a contributor to a right-on parenting website, ‘£400 a week gets you 24/7 care and those who have outstayed their visa are cheaper still.’ Nice.

Some yummy mummies (or mummies-to-be) have taken to attending Catholic churches in Kensington where the congregation is full of devout young Filipinas. But there’s one potential hazard. When Mummy and Daddy are out, some Asian women talk to the toddlers in their own language. There’s a horror story doing the rounds of an English three-year-old who, on her first day at kindergarten, spoke to the other children in Nepalese.

Almost every discussion about nannies, whether over the dinner table or online, reveals an undercurrent of anxiety. And it’s an anxiety about foreigners — not just foreign nannies but also the overseas buyers who now buy one in five houses in affluent parts of London and are also colonising public schools. Topflight nannies have joined the long list of things that Sloanes once thought were theirs by right — the old school tie, the house in SW1, the bespoke suit — but are now out of their price range.

Hence the nanny-poaching. But, believe me, I’m not advocating it. Not only did I fail in my greedy mission; the friend whose ‘treasure’ I was trying to steal hasn’t spoken to me since.

The Sloanes look down on such outrageous t­ reatment of ‘staff’. And it annoys them to see foreign ­children being wheeled around Kensington Gardens

by Mary Poppins in the Rolls-Royce of prams, the Silver Cross, which carried the future Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, Prince William and now Prince George.

These things don’t come cheap. Norland Nannies, founded in 1892, are flesh-and-blood proof of parents’ income: they charge between £34,000 and £65,000 gross, depending on educational level. It tells you a lot about modern London that business is thriving, though the customer profile has changed.

Abbey Searle of the Norland Agency says: ‘Our nannies’ heightened profile has meant that demand has remained constant. As for our students, we have never had such a high level of applicants. This year, we are training 70 nannies, as opposed to 60 last year. And for September 2015 we have 80 enrolled.’

It helps that Prince George’s Spanish nanny, the elegant and slender Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo, is a Norland graduate.

Some Sloanes have been heard to mutter that, if Norland isn’t careful, it’s going to lose its reputation as the Eton of nanny agencies. But then they’re bitter at being priced out of the market.

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LIFE

ST AY ONSI DE

to stomp in the divots at polo? Dare we ask the score?

Each sport has its language and grammar as well as uniform and codes of behaviour. Last summer, I was in a box at Lord’s and introduced Piers Morgan to the US ambassador and stood between them, my head swivelling from side to side as if watching men’s singles, while Piers lectured the ambo on Americans’ fondness for firearms. Finally Matthew Barzun sighed and said, ‘You Brits don’t get our gun laws and we Yanks,’ he gestured to the hallowed turf, across which a ball was dribbling out to silly point, ‘don’t get your cricket.’

Just as it’s harder for a woman to speak sport like a man, it’s also harder somehow to be an acceptable female spectator, even if — unlike Barzun — you’re English and went to a boys’ prep school.

A woman’s guide to forming a happy part of the fussiest crowds in sport Rachel Johnson The Season — Wimbledon, Ascot, Henley etc — is a social construct arranged largely around sporting fixtures. This makes it peculiarly fraught for women.

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Royal Box style guide? ‘No bare arms (bingo wings when you clap), no deep V-necks (too much flesh when you lean forward) thing about sport and use the game as a see-and-beseen opportunity (on this basis, Victoria Beckham, who turned up to Wimbledon in a negligée and looked bored, is a classic spectator; whereas Pippa Middleton, who plays in the first pair at Queen’s, is an echt fan).

Kim Sears is definitely in the latter camp, as we saw in the Australian Open semi-final earlier this year.

Andy Murray was trying to break his opponent Tomas Berdych in the third set and little Kim let fly with a potty-mouthed tirade. Which was quite a surprise. After all, up till now, Kim had been known for her swishy, Pantene advertisement hair and her pet portraits.

Across the Atlantic, there’s no equivalent of the sporting ‘season’, so it’s at basketball and football games that pop stars and Hollywood and fashion collide: at these floodlit photo­- ops where folks like Beyoncé and Jay Z, Rihanna, the Olsen Twins and Olivia Wilde come in stacked hi­tops to show off their latest squeezes. ‘Basketball is always fun, like any

Rachel Johnson’s novel Fresh Hell is published

by Penguin.

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN MOUNSEY

sport when your team is winning,’ says the stylist and make­-up artist Gucci Westman. ‘The music and entertainment, beers and peanuts — it’s all a good adrenaline rush.’

At these games you can tell the difference between a real fan and a celebrity instantly. The fan is glued to the ball, but the celebrity doesn’t know, or appear to care, who’s winning. So as a woman, the trick is to walk a fine line — be not so much ditsy Wag as dignified and committed, especially in the Royal Box. ‘I think my mother always looked wonderful,’ says Lady Helen Taylor (her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, are Wimbledon’s longest-serving royals), ‘but she did worry about her dress creasing.’ Her style guide for the Royal Box and other high-octane sporting occasions?

‘No bare arms, because of bingo wings when you clap, and no deep V-necks, as you show too much flesh when you lean forward.’

Basically, for all summer sports, so long as you remember the places where women are best seen but not heard (the boxes) and where they’re not allowed at all (the Long Room at Lord’s), and roughly look the part, you’re fine.

As for rugby and football — these are sport’s hardship postings (apart from the hospitality suites at the grounds, of course). ‘There’s no see-and-be-seen about rugby,’ agrees Catherine Faulks, whose son Archie played rugby for England as a schoolboy, and who spent every winter weekend of his adolescence on the muddy touchline or in the stands.

‘All the women I know who go to watch go because they love the game and they’re keen. It’s not flashy. You can’t show off your outfit, because you’re in a crowd of 80,000 people and wearing five layers.’ The only competition when it comes to rugby, in fact, is who brings out the fanciest lunch and the runniest Scotch eggs from Harrods Food Hall in the back of the Range Rover in the car park.

I had to check with a higher authority to establish whether I get it wrong at the touchline as well as at Wimbledon. I was worried that screaming ‘Come on Wellington!’ and shouting ‘BOOOM! ’ when the school scores was all wrong. ‘Cheer the name and not the school and don’t be loud and try and grab all the attention,’ my son confirmed by text.

So this is my strong advice as we dive into a long, hot, high-heeled summer of sport. Don’t worry about forgetting the offside rule. Like everything else, including sex, being the perfect spectator is 90 per cent enthusiasm and only 10 per cent expertise. Remember that — and your thermals — and you’ll get away with anything.

At my prep school there weren’t enough girls (there were two of us) so I joined the boys’ sides for games, arriving at some rival prep for away matches in my rugger shorts or cricket whites and, as Englishmen like to say of their childhood beatings, it never did me any harm.

It has not been possible in quite the same way to play organised team sports with large numbers of the opposite sex every weekday and every Saturday afternoon as an adult, which has been a sadness.

But even I can spend hours as a fixture looms, wondering what to wear for a rugby international, even though there’s an inviolable dress code of clumpy chestnut Dubarry boots and Barbour (for both sexes).

I’ve spent dog-years fretting about the right frock to wear at Wimbledon, and wondering whether it’s acceptable to scream on the touchline when my children play team games. (Parents have been banned from cheering on Sundays by the Rugby Football Union, and the Football Association has started offering courses to parents caught swearing during children’s football matches.)

And then there’s the not insignificant matter of looking the part. Just as fashion has its front row, so do most sporting events now, and photos taken at gala occasions reveal the important difference between the casual spectator and the fanatic supporter, the civilian and the celebrity.

It is often assumed that women don’t know any-

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LIFE

SAM NEILL

Memories of family members caught up in war bring a tear to the eye…

Crying time sion all our families. Nothing special about my family, except we have a lot of soldiers going back on both sides for hundreds of years. British army in the main, so generations of stiff upper lips. My forebears invaded both Burma and Afghanistan twice; they were there in the Napoleonic wars; my grandfather even marched into Tibet with Younghusband. And of course they were also at Gallipoli — I doubt there is anywhere on the planet the British have been where we didn’t have a dog in one fight or another.

So naturally a few relatives of mine turn up in the course of the film, including the aforesaid grandfather: Lt Col Robert Ingham DSO, Royal Garrison Artillery, killed in Belgium in 1917 aged 36. By all accounts a delightfully amusing man and an excellent soldier, he fell for my grandmother while serving in India. He was much taken with her seat — in spite of always riding side-saddle, she could trounce any man at show-jumping. My mother had one startling memory of Bob, home on leave, showing my grandmother his tin hat, thinking she would think the dent from a glancing bullet a great joke. To his consternation, Ella burst into inconsolable tears. She was right — not at all funny. He didn’t come

Last week a woman stopped me in the street here in Sydney and promptly burst into tears. I was aghast. I really can’t say I’m in favour of crying. I associate it with those early days at boarding school: it’s hard to forget an entire dormitory of sevenor eight-year-old boys weeping themselves to sleep. Every night.

Or with those sticky relationship breakups from the dim past. Enough said …

Anyway, this woman was a perfect stranger, so there was little chance she was breaking up with me. As it happened, she had watched our documentary Anzac : Tides of Blood on the telly a couple of nights before. This covers 100 years of conflict since Gallipoli in 1915. It had gotten to her, and she wasn’t the last — I’ve had more feedback from this than anything I’ve ever done.

In the Antipodes, remembrance of the landings in the Dardanelles a century ago is huge right now. One question I ask in the film is why, of all the battles in all the campaigns in all the wars we have fought, do we in Australia and New Zealand remember this appalling balls-up more than any other? The British, the Irish and the French lost more men than we did there, but have chosen to forget this campaign almost entirely. Curious. One of Churchill’s more hare-brained ideas, it was supposed to result in an easy Turkish capitulation, thereby taking them out of the war. Instead it meant the men being stuck on a beach for nine months at the mercy of Turkish guns and the brilliant Kemal Atatürk. Simply ghastly.

Another question I ask is how all of this affected my own family — and by exten-

My grandmother Ella had a corgi who was still shell-shocked after being bombed by the Germans at Milford Haven

home again, and left her a widow with two small children. Poor Bob, poor Ella.

I never saw my mother tearful though.

‘A soldier’s daughter never cries,’ she’d been taught growing up in Wales. She did however say once, ‘We never cried in the second world war. One worried that if you started, you’d never stop.’ Sterner stuff, that generation. In the course of filming I found Bob’s grave at Poperinge. To my complete surprise I found myself tearing up. Not the full blub, you understand, more a choke and a gulp. What got me more than anything else was the inscription: ‘So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’ Would it were so, John Bunyan. This was, to me, a direct message from my beloved grandmother Ella: her vision for Bob. Sob. Ella lived in Tenby, and was the kindest person I ever knew. She had an enormous corgi that was still shell-shocked after being bombed by the Germans at Milford Haven, and thus was unable to walk. Gran, nothing daunted, would wheel the fearful dog around the town in an immense Edwardian pram. People who didn’t know Ella would be somewhat startled to find an orange canine blimp in the carriage instead of a bouncing baby.

Despite losing her darling Bob to the Hun, she ran a humble canteen in her garden for German prisoners of war allowed out on day leave. In return for this simple kindheartedness, she received letters and cards from those Germans to the day she died. Now that brings a tear to my eye…

Sam Neill is an actor of sorts, and a vigneron of distinction at Two Paddocks.

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The finest art has become so pricy that smart multi-millionaires are moving on to architecture Stephen Bayley

GERARD JULIEN/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

T H E HOUSE C OL L E C T OR S

The very rich are more competitive than you and me. It’s what made them very rich in the first place.

At a smart wedding in Paris, thinking myself impressively cosmopolitan, I asked a fellow guest where he lived. He looked a bit quizzically, then quickly decided to patronise me, saying, ‘I have just flown in from Rio, but I work in New York and London where I also keep homes. I have an apartment here in Paris and another in Monte Carlo. Oh yes, a small place in Munich. But really I live in Ibiza.’ I know a developer who often teases people by asking them if they have as many as the 52 lavatories he claims as his own.

Collecting property has always been a privilege of money. And so too has architectural patronage, but in the past 20 years these two subtly different areas

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ANDREAS FEININGER; DON EMMERT/AFP; VIEW PICTURES / GETTYIMAGES

of acquisition and cupidity have come together in a new and more powerful way of showing off: collecting architecture itself. Nowadays, a man in possession of a fortune commissions an architect.

Or if his fortune is not a small one, several architects. At La Coste, near Bonnieux, Paddy McKillen (who until very recently owned a collection of London’s spiffiest hotels) has built an astonishing architectural theme park in a lush Provençal vineyard landscape. You immediately think ‘vulgarian bombast’ and then you find buildings by Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry, so you think again.

People have real-world portfolios of bricks and concrete. And in the case of André Balazs, the proprietor of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, metal. He bought an example of Jean Prouvé’s innovative aluminium pre-fab Maison Tropicale and, after an image-building museum tour, installed it in a Caribbean resort, making something of a mockery of the architect’s utopian and democratic intentions. But Prouvé, also found ­ arling at La Coste, is currently the collectible designer d of the New York art crowd — and logic plays no part in a stampede to acquire impressive architectural trophies.

Various factors are involved in this new practice of architectural trophy-hunting. One, the stellar price of museum-quality art puts great paintings out of the reach of mere billionaires while masterpiece architecture is still affordable, although these things are relative. Two, architecture itself has changed status recently. The art dealer Niall Hobhouse now concentrates on architectural drawings alone. In them he, quite rightly, find aesthetic value no less than in ‘fine’ art.

And architecture is no longer a trade practised by tweedy bespectacled techno-artisans. Instead, the names of the glittering leaders of a globalised profession have become, through a lot of slavish media attention, labels as aspirational and as redolent of certain values as Gucci, Hermès and Cartier once were: Gehry means dramatic shape-making for glamorous causes; Ando means smooth concrete and green walls suggesting nearly religious high-mindedness; Pawson means sophisticated cool.

Three: now that the term ‘Modern’ has become a safe historical style label and is no longer politically threatening, there is a brisk market in Modern heritage homes. A record here is that Christie’s recently sold Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs for $16 million. More modestly, the week I am writing this, a fine 1984 Frank Gehry Guest House at Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota, inspired by the compositions of Giorgio Morandi, was sold at auction for just under $1 million. For someone who can afford a plane, a Gehry is a nice collectible conversation piece.

Left: Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, bought

by Aby Rosen Previous page: a Frank Gehry building at Paddy McKillen’s architectural theme park in Provence

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Klein and Nicole Kidman. Adroitly publicised by the developer, Meier’s own name became as lustrous as Kidman’s and Klein’s, setting up a whole culture of expectations and feverish speculation in the fashionable end of the Manhattan property market. New York magazine said this demonstrated that ‘architecture could be monetised’. Indeed it could.

While this was going on, the international Pritzker Prize and the Serpentine Gallery’s annual pavilions accelerated the new celebrity status of architects. The Pritzker is an annual prize for lifetime achievement, created by the family which established the Hyatt chain of hotels, whose own reputation was made with astonishingly exuberant designs by John Portman.

This was architecture’s first dalliance with modern notions of branding, a process still continuing.

At the Serpentine since 2000, temporary summer pavilions have made stellar reputations for architects who were, before their 15 minutes in Kensington Gardens, famous for never having built in this country. The temporary nature of a Serpentine pavilion allows experimentation that would not be possible in a permanent building, but also encourages an evanescent faddishness which some find inappropriate to the mother of the arts. Still, this is good news for collectors: Serpentine pavilions are easily knocked down Above and right: Maison Tropicale

by Jean Prouvé

An example of Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale was installed in a Caribbean resort, making a mockery of the architect’s utopian, democratic intentions

The archaeology of the trend is interesting: the collecting of trophy architecture has tracked the rise of the architect-as-celebrity. There are several points of origin here, but one of the most significant occurred in 1989, when Sotheby’s sold its first building. This was the 1949 house on East 52nd Street which Philip Johnson designed for Blanchette Rockefeller. It was bought

by Anthony d’Offay who then, in a tribal fugue of collectorism, sold it on to Ronald Lauder.

Namechecking architects, hitherto often anonymous, soon become compulsory for expensive new residential properties. In 2002, two apartments in Richard Meier’s towers in the West Village were sold to Calvin

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and inherently mobile. The 2014 pavilion by Smiljan Radic can now be found in the Somerset garden of the art dealer Iwan Wirth.

In New York, collectors of trophy architecture have ambitions beyond the garden. Aby Rosen of RFR Holdings, a property investor who already owns more than a hundred Warhols, has acquired the landmark Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft as well as Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, two of the greatest Modernist masterpieces. Here’s a man who collects skyscrapers! But Rosen’s trophy-hunting is not merely antiquarian: this collector makes architectural history, too, working with hotelier Ian Schrager on the Gramercy Park Hotel with its John Pawson interiors. The Pawson name adds a premium to the price of any building it’s attached to. Rosen said ‘having a celebrity architect design a project adds a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or an additional 1 to 3 per cent’. Seems he was wrong: an LSE survey recently put that figure at 25 per cent.

Another New York firm of developers called Sumaida + Khurana is committed to what it calls ‘seminal’ architecture, apparently a synonym for very expensive.

Being built is a 400ft residential tower by Alvaro Siza planned for 11th Avenue and 56th Street. This is Siza’s first work in the US and a stampede of early-adopting trophy-hunters is anticipated. Sumaida + Khurana is also building a condominium by the revered Pritzker-winning Osaka architect Tadao Ando.

It is possible that Ando will monetise even better than Meier or Pawson. Leonard Steinberg, a Sumaida + Khurana associate, recalled recently being at a pool in Capri when someone asked if he knew about the Ando project (which opens in November next year).

Steinberg said, ‘All of a sudden the entire pool started talking about Ando and his magic.’ Yes. Now very rich people are becoming competitive about who designed their condo.

Above: Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine pavilion, now in Iwan Wirth’s Somerset garden

Perhaps it is not surprising that collecting was defined as a neurosis at an international medical conference in Paris in the 1950s. ‘Taste,’ as Bernard Berenson knew, ‘begins when appetite is satisfied.’

The very rich are hungry only for status, so their eternal struggle is to find an identity which, at least for the moment, they do through the acquisition of trophy architecture.

But there are problems. No one, whatever their budget, could realistically assemble an architectural portfolio including Michelangelo, Wren and Gaudí, but if aspirations are limited to the Modern period, then a new species of specialist property consultant is here to help sooth the anxieties of the neurotic rich. There is Interbau in Germany, Mossler in the US and the Modern House in this country. Right now, the Modern House can sell you an Eric Lyons ‘Span’ house in Blackheath for £ 800,000, Amyas Connell’s masterpiece ‘High and Over’ in Amersham for £2.8 million and a Berthold Lubetkin apartment in the City for £700,000.

Naturally, there are absurdities. I know one family of conventional tastes and high net worth who built an extreme Modernist house in a Hampstead mews and filled it with shrieking angular furnit u re i n order to i mpres s t hei r f r iend s when entertaining. Then, when the guests’ cabs had safely receded, they retreated to a neighbouring villa, conventionally flocked, deep-pile-carpeted and veloured with velvet curtains and satin tie-backs. But maybe this was not so very different to Lord Burlington, who lived on Piccadilly but built his trophy house in Chiswick.

For so long as there are celebrity architects, the rich will compete to acquire buildings with their names attached. But remember John Updike’s warning: ‘Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.’

Maybe he should have said ‘façade’.

ROB STOTHARD; DAVID M BENETT / GETTYIMAGES

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BUC K FIZZ

really bad, I like to wind the offenders up even more by mentioning my dislike of strawberries — you should see their faces then.)

There’s also the fact that you’re the one made to feel in the wrong for wanting an alternative in the first place. The motoring journalist Nat Barnes, a fellow fizz-phobic, attends a lot of corporate hospitality events. ‘You’d be amazed how often these things aren’t geared up for a request for something other than champagne,’ he says. ‘You can look something of a social outcast, standing there empty-­handed while everyone else is swigging away. I’ve even had times when it’s caused the host concern — they think you’ve been missed.’ Well, they should have provided some other options to start with, shouldn’t they? Nat has also seen people get worried by the lack of booze in his hand. ‘If you’re standing there drinking water, it can make them slightly on edge, as if you might be trying to get them drunk so they’ll accidentally let slip a story.’

It shouldn’t be shameful to dislike champagne Mark Mason

It isn’t just me and the Windsors.

The French actor Louis Jourdan, famous for his role as a champagneswilling playboy in the film Gigi, in real life couldn’t stand the stuff; it gave him a headache. The Queen’s reason is that it makes her burp

No one minds if you don’t like vodka. No one throws parties at which it’s the only alcoholic drink on offer, forcing you to choose either vodka and tonic or orange juice. The same is true of bitter — it would be ridiculous for a host arbitrarily to decide that all his guests must spend the night supping pints of Fuller’s. But champagne? You don’t like champagne? What’s wrong with you?

Summer party season is upon us, that medium-sized sea of champagne in which everybody loves to swim like giggling seals. Except for those of us who don’t, on account of our perverse, unnatural, virtually immoral character defect: we — cue those H.E. Bateman gasps — don’t like the stuff. How do we cope at champagne-only parties? Usually we take a glass and bite our lips, not just to stop us firing off a rant at the naked bloody rudeness of society’s assumption that it’s bound to be to our liking, but also to stop any of the liquid entering our mouth as we tip the glass upwards and pretend to enjoy it. This, incidentally, is how the Queen operates when ‘drinking’ champagne for a toast. She, like many of her family, dislikes it.

But perhaps we shouldn’t keep quiet. Perhaps that rant should be delivered after all. Minorities are meant to be heard these days.

OK, this one’s a really small minority — but doesn’t that make us even more important? It isn’t just me and the Windsors. There’s the French actor Louis Jourdan (or at least there was, until his recent death). Famous for his role as a fizz-swilling playboy in the film Gigi, in real life he couldn’t stand champagne: it gave him a ­headache. The Queen’s reason, apparently, is that it makes her burp. While I’ve experienced both these properties — no, let’s call them what they are — design faults of champagne, I’d also add another: it gives me heartburn. What better way to celebrate a special occasion than by standing there trying to ignore the feeling that you’ve drunk the contents of a car battery? It’s not a wine thing. I love wine. It’s a bubbles thing. Fizzy drinks are for kids, right?

Of course, you can avoid the physical problems by avoiding champagne itself. But then you get landed with a different set of issues. Not just the ‘What do you mean, you don’t like champagne?’ riff, the pitying, patronising expressions of surprise that teeter on the edge of ‘Never mind, one day you’ll see the error of your ways and come over to our side, old boy.’ (If these get

But in the end these are minor complaints. The really annoying thing about champagne is the goat-getting aura of smugness that surrounds it. The way people call it ‘shampoo’. The way the cricket commentator Trevor Bailey used to refer to a ‘magnum of the medicine’. The way the drink’s very name is a result of Gallic protectionism: make your sparkling wine anywhere else and you have to call it prosecco or cava. (Come on, I’m having a go at the French here — surely we can agree on this, if nothing else?) Champagne isn’t a drink, it’s a religion, and a pretty fundamentalist one at that.

It’s the one good reason for watching Formula One, the bit on the podium after the race when the drivers spray gallons of bubbly over each other. Always fun to hear the champagne ayatollahs chuntering away about that.

So what I can do? Nothing, other than quietly ask if there might be a bottle of red knocking about. And serve champagne at my own 40th birthday party. (A Salmanezah of Pol Roger, since you ask – everyone said it was gorgeous, I got stuck into the Adnams bitter.

I just wish people would return the favour once in a while.) Plus, of course, I always enjoy accepting champagne as a present, knowing the bottle will go straight into the fridge until the next time I need a gift for someone else. No temptation at all to drink it — to me champagne is a currency, rather like snout in prisons. Chin chin to that.

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At the Waterfront

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A T OA ST T O GR A PE BR I TA I N

popularity has grown exponentially. When it comes to supermarket sales, Waitrose has led the way. They currently have a 60 per cent market share in English wine sales as well as their own vineyard in Hampshire, and saw a 95 per cent increase in sales between 2013 and 2014. The incomparable Wine Pantry in Borough Market, south London, is the only shop to sell exclusively English wine and British produce, and has a dispensing machine that offers more than 20 different English wines on tap, allowing customers to get a taste of everything the country has to offer.

It’s not just wine merchants and specialists singing the praises of English wines, though. Harvey Nichols have just launched their own English sparkling wine label, which will be available in their stores and at the Oxo Tower restaurant. Working with Digby Fine English Wine, they have created a product that they believe ‘competes favourably with its French counterpart’: champagne.

This may well be true — after all, French champagne houses have already been busily buying up vineyard land in the South Downs

English vineyards could provide the solution to the summer’s prosecco drought Camilla Swift

French champagne houses have been busily buying up vineyard land in the south of England, where near-perfect growing conditions are to be found

Already this summer we have heard cries of outrage from the newspapers as headlines warned us of an impending prosecco shortage.

‘A prosecco shortage? What’s a girl to do?’ they demanded. ‘What would summer be without it?’ Well, those in the know already have the answer — and it can be found closer to home than you might expect, in vineyards right across the south of England.

But are there really English sparkling wines worth drinking?

Isn’t this all just part of the fashion for choosing locally grown fare rather than imported products? Maybe, partly. But there are British alternatives to prosecco that are well worth going local for — or at least, that’s the general consensus. Nik Darlington of Red Squirrel Wine, which specialises in rare, native and alternative wines, points to Wiston, a small outfit in West Sussex who are producing ‘seriously good fizz’ with ‘packaging to die for’ and made by Dermot Sugrue (previously of Nyetimber). Nyetimber are, of course, the ones who have led the way when it comes to English sparkling wine, but many smaller businesses, such as Wiston, are now snapping at their heels. Others in the heel-snapping category include — in Darlington’s opinion — Bolney in West Sussex, Gusbourne and Herbert Hall in Kent and Jenkyn Place in Hampshire.

Sparkling wine is the area in which we hear the most about English produce. But although it has without doubt made a name for itself, English rosés and whites have also been successful. Chapel Down, one of the most famous names, was served at the royal wedding in 2011, and its wines can be found in London bars and shops. Its recent crowdfunding campaign on the Tube is, to date, the UK’s largest such initiative, raising almost £4 million in just over three weeks.

English-grown wine is no new phenomenon. The Romans were famously keen on viticulture, and tried growing grapes all over the UK — reportedly as far north as Lincolnshire. Monks continued the vinegrowing for communion purposes and by the time Henry VIII came to the throne there were more than 100 vineyards across the country. The first world war put paid to British wine-growing, however, and with land needed for crops and food rather than alcohol, vineyards were put on the back burner.

But in the past few decades they have popped up again across the south of England, and in the last couple of years English wine’s

since the soil, along with what seems to be an increasingly warmer climate, seems to be creating near-perfect conditions for champagne grapes including chardonnay, pinot noir and meunier.

So what does the future hold for English wines? Is it just a flash in the pan, developed off the back of the current trend for all things local? For now its prospects certainly look rosy. English sparkling, white and rosé wines have all won numerous international competitions, and although our climate isn’t ideal for red wines, some decent pinot noirs are emerging.

Nik Darlington says that there is a huge clamour for English wine in the UK, with investors keen to get involved and demand for the liquid itself regularly exceeding supply. One promising development is the English wine research centre at Plumpton College near Brighton, which was opened by the Duchess of Cornwall in March last year. The first place in Britain to offer an MSc in viticulture and oenology, its staff are conducting essential research into improving British wine-making — such as how to combat the more negative aspects of the British weather — as well as encouraging a new generation of English-trained winemakers.

One of the main problems for small wineries is the large amount of capital needed upfront to start production, with little in the way of profit for the first few years. This is most likely the reason why the likes of Chapel Down, Denbies (who, based in Surrey, are the largest wine producer in the UK geographically) and Nyetimber are the names that pop up time and time again on menus and in shops. But if investors really are interested — and the popularity of English wine continues to rise — it would be no surprise to see increasing numbers of English vineyards at the international awards ceremonies in the future.

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THE W ISH L IST Photography by Arthur Woodcroft

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O ISL A N D IN THE SU N

If you want a taste of Jamaica, log on to the website of the Gleaner and scroll through the headlines. Ian Fleming, who wrote the Bond books at his house Goldeneye on the northern coast, made it one of the secret agent’s favourite newspapers, preferably perused over a breakfast of salt fish and ackee, the local staple.

Become an international Gleaner reader and you’ll get an instant mobile fix of day-to-day life in Jamaica: the tragicomedy of local politics, the dire economy, the high urban crime rate, the fierce national pride, as well as the poetry and sense of the absurd that characterises the language. Quotes are often in patois, and headlines irresistibly bizarre: ‘The bus can swim’, ‘Don’t count hub chickens, before they are hatched, JA told.’

Jamaica is a strange place, full of strange advice. After seeing a crocodile sunbathing on the banks, we were bemused when our cab driver started talking about the swimming opportunities afforded by the Black River. Crocodiles don’t just sunbathe, they

Jamaica, land of sun, sea and literature festivals Olivia Cole

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T RAV E L

Left: Black River, where crocodiles dwell

periodically help themselves to anyone insane enough to get into the water. If you’re swimming in the Black River, the local advice is: ‘Make sure there’s someone swimming behind you.’ Welcome to Jamaica.

Crocodiles aside, the rural south-west of the country — the parish of St Elizabeth’s — is relatively safe and peaceful. Treasure Beach, one of my favourite places in the world, is remote and wildly beautiful.

After the flight from London, you are a two-hour drive from Montego Bay through the Santa Cruz mountains. On the road the same endless combination appears in the mountain villages. Brightly coloured temples to godlessness, and to the fear of God, in each tiny place: a brothel, a bar and often a Seventh Day Adventist church with perhaps a barber’s and a beauty salon. This remoteness is part of the magic. You have to really want to get to Treasure Beach, a community of less than 4,000 with no all-inclusive ‘resort’ in sight.

It’s easy to see how writers like Noël Coward in 1956, and Fleming ten years before, came and, in their imaginations, at least, never really left. Fleming wrote all the Bond books here (three of them are partly set in Jamaica) and their bewildering juxtaposition of extreme violence and extreme beauty arguably owes something to the world he discovered in the 1940s.

With the exception of some urban areas, and as long as you are sensible, Jamaica is a safer place to visit today.

Previous page: a saltwater pool at Jake’s Hotel

There are two other figures — not quite as well known as Fleming — who helped export a version of Jamaica to the world: Chris Blackwell, whose Island Records shared reggae (including that of Bob Marley) with the world, and the late writer and filmmaker Perry Henzell, whose 1972 film The Harder They Come made Jimmy Cliff a star and remains a classic.

Despite its tiny size, Treasure Beach is also home to two uniquely Jamaican cultural creations. The first is Jake’s Hotel, a 35-year labour of love on the part of Sally Henzell, Perry’s wife. In a travel industry where many make this claim, this simple but stylish idyll is truly a ‘boutique’ hotel. It’s by no means the fanciest or most indulgent hotel in the world, but that is part of the charm.

Unlike most boutique hotels, Jake’s really did grow slowly — the first of its 20 or so rooms were for fans of Sally’s restaurant, so that they could sleep over. New cottages and rooms have been added over the years.

With names like Cockles and Octopussy, they are individually designed, built and decorated and collaged with coloured glass and shells: Sally Henzell’s Jamaican take on Gaudí.

One of the main attractions (aided by the London-Jamaica time difference) is waking up naturally early, and, half asleep, watching the sun come up over the sea. Jake’s is not a ‘bring-me-my-breakfast-

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Above: roof terrace at a cottage at Jake’s

with him, but would always ask that she wasn’t sitting too near. These days literary encounters here are likely to be less fierce but there’s a good chance they will be as memorable. My most notable morning at Calabash 2014 was sun salutations in the company of Jamaica Kincaid, Paul Muldoon and Colum McCann.

Calabash started life as a set of writing workshops for Jamaican writers. The national literary scene remains its heart — it’s not about big names unless they have a book that will really connect with the audience. The poet Kwame Dawes, who co-founded Calabash with Justine Henzell (Perry and Sally’s daughter) and the novelist Colin Channer, sees a powerful connection between Jamaica’s literary scene and reggae,

Most rooms at Jake’s have beds outside. ‘Da people like to make love looking dem stars’, is one of owner Sally Henzell’s more memorable design edicts the island’s most famous cultural export. ‘The spirit of Calabash is a reggae aesthetic — rooted in the present space, in the present moment of Jamaican life and culture — but willing and daring to enter the wider world.’

The Jamaican fighting spirit embodied by Ivanoe Martin, Jimmy Cliff’s character in The Harder They Come, can achieve remarkable things. ‘In every Jamaican there is “I can — me — I can do that”,’ he told me, when I recently met him in London. ‘Take bobsleigh, I mean we don’t have any snow but oh, “I can do that, I can bobsleigh.” When that spirit is used in a positive way it can be marvellous.’ It’s hard to think of a better example of this than Calabash, nurturing a vibrant Jamaican literary scene.

The local word for immigrants (many to the UK) who left in the 1950s and 1960s but saved all their life to build houses they could retire to is a ‘returnee’. You see their half-started or half-finished architectural creations all over the island: the dream of a permanent move home being slowly improved and worked on over decades. Put Calabash 2016 in your diary, and you’ll soon discover that Jamaica makes returnees of us all.

Right: town scene in west Jamaica

Virgin Atlantic flights and seven nights at Jake’s on a room only basis with private transfers starts from £999 per person. See jakeshotel.com, calabashfestival.org and visitjamaica.com

ALL PHOTOS GREG JOHNSON / GETTY IMAGES

in-bed’ type of place, but you’ll find wine and a couple of Red Stripes in the fridge, and a coffee machine (Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee will get you hooked; James Bond used to like that too). A mug of coffee, a cosy bed outside, regular 80-degree heat and a seascape that dwarfs you, what more could you want? ‘Da people like to make love looking dem stars’, is one of Sally’s more memorable design edicts.

While remaining authentic, and resolutely against Wi-Fi, phones or TVs in the rooms (why watch any of these devices when you could look at the sea or the sky?) the rustic charm has been sensitively modified in recent years by Sally’s son Jason and his wife Laura, who now run the business.

Treasure Beach’s second cultural destination is perhaps — given the remoteness — even more surprising. Calabash is a literary festival held once every two years that pulls in names to rival festivals ten times its size and is Jamaica’s major literary event. While Jake’s has a high-octane ‘gypsy set’ crowd (Kate Moss, Marianne Faithfull, Jude Law and co.), Calabash, founded in 2004, brings in the rock stars of the literary world, from Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka to Sharon Olds, Billy Collins and Salman Rushdie.

One night we asked Sally what it was like going to dinner with the famously rebarbative Noël Coward.

Her advice was much like the local tips for crocodiles.

As a beautiful teenager she would happily go to dinner

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GTLRO AV B EE L T ROT T I NG

Otters and batcaves Haute cuisine on the French Riviera, high times in Greece — our latest travel favourites 1

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2. Hotel Gotham, Manchester Holy art deco! A boutique hotel with a massive nod to 1920s Manhattan and its fictional counterpart Gotham City. hotelgotham.co.uk

4. La Reserve, Ramatuelle You’ll feel right at home here — if your home has a view to die for, Creme de la Mer spa treatments and a Michelin-starred chef. lareserve-ramatuelle.com

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O N E T O WA T C H

BOR N PLUC K Y Countertenor Iestyn Davies introduces lutenist Thomas Dunford

Tom started playing the lute when he was five years old, and has been playing professionally since he was 14. Growing up he had posters on his wall of this really famous lutenist, Paul O’Dette, who’s an enormous bearded kind of hobbit figure. Where other kids had Baywatch posters in their bedrooms, he had this elfin king, Tolkien image.

When people listen to Glenn Gould playing the piano — Bach or something like that — they hear him humming in the background as if he was creating the music from scratch. It’s like that with actors, too. Al Pacino described Mark Rylance as someone who speaks Shakespeare like it was written last night, and Tom plays the lute like that. He plays in a very free style. It feels very improvisatory.

Because he’s young, he’s really eager to explore different repertoire. When we play Renaissance music by John ­D owland, we do jokey encores that aren’t expected. For example, Tom was reviewed in a classical magazine as the Eric Clapton of the lute, so I thought this was a perfect opportunity t o s i n g ‘ Te a r s i n H e ave n’. W h e r e a s s o m e classical musicians would think it was corny, Tom loves that.

W hen I met Tom at age 2 4, 2 5, he seemed somewhat sweetly naive. I felt like I had to look after him, and take him under my wing. To go on a tour, just the two of you, without any manager, it’s scary stuff. Tom can be completely disorganised.

Two weeks before we went on a tour to America, he said, ‘Oh, who’s bought the flight?’ I said, ‘You. They pay you back later on.’ He said, ‘Oh. I haven’t bought it. Or one for the lute.’ The lute has to have a seat of its own. He now books for himself and Mr Lute, who sits next to him.

Basically he’s like a teenager — as long as he’s got a bed, he’s happy. He’s like a troubadour, too.

I’d look across at him in a really smart venue like the Washington Kennedy Center and think, there are holes in the middle of his trousers. Before our Carnegie Hall recital I forced him to go into H&M and buy some black trousers, no matter how cheap, because they would look at least new. Tom needs

Iestyn Davies appears in Handel’s Saul at Glyndebourne from 23 July to 29 August.

Thomas Dunford performs at the York Early Music Festival on 5 July.

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someone to do all of that for him. You need to get him on stage because that’s when he’s at his best.

He’s brilliant. He’s still young, which makes it better because he’s not a worn-out, bitter musician. He really loves the lute and wants to go places with it.

It’s beyond him just being able to play the lute ­— it’s about him as a person. Every time he plays with me, people say, ‘I can’t believe how young he is,’ and ‘I can’t believe how he plays.’ In disguise they are saying, ‘Wow! He stole the show.’ It’s this really delicate music, like fine needlework in a ­t apestry, and everyone’s sitting in complete silence. There’s no shuffling. He manages to draw everybody in.

That’s a really special talent.

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