High Life | 7 March 2009

Gstaad

Thirty years ago this week my daughter was three and my son had not been born. I had left Gstaad for gloomy, strike-ridden, non-stop power cuts London, and the mother of my children was peeved at me as I had begun circling the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James. The Speccie was selling 7,000 copies, the New Statesman 70,000, and Jim Callaghan was asking the press what crisis they were banging on about. Oh yes, Jeffrey Bernard’s column followed mine and it was called ‘End Piece’. An appropriate name for England’s oldest and most elegantly written magazine, as it looked like curtains as far as the country was concerned.

Then Margaret Thatcher happened and most of you know the rest. It all came back as I watched The Making of the Iron Lady last week. Not the ambulance drivers blacking patients, not the bin-men letting the rubbish fill the streets, not the dockers blocking food supplies and letting them rot, but the night of her fall. I was at Harry’s Bar with Maya Even, Alistair McAlpine and Alexander Hesketh. The two men had come from the Lords. Except for Maya we were all drunk and swearing loudly against the pygmies who had brought her down. Instead of a lefty plot — after all, she was unflinching in her determination to put an end to socialism in Britain, and she had managed it — it was a Julius Caesar assassination without the daggers. I got to know Lady T after her fall. She and the great Denis used to come to Gstaad in the summer and lived just above the tennis courts of the Palace hotel. She had begun work on her memoirs.