Bidding a fond, and drunken, farewell to the awe-inspiring Mark Amory

Rubbing shoulders with political suits on the pavement outside the Westminster Arms, I drank two pints of Spitfire. Pump primed, I strolled the 50 quaint yards along Old Queen Street and entered the Spectator offices through the open door of number 22. An elderly chap on his way out said, ‘You’ve missed the speeches.’ I said, ‘Is all of literary London in there?’ ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he said huffily.

I went downstairs to the party and grabbed a ready-poured gin and tonic from the drinks table of one’s dreams. For the next hour, knocking back gins and working my way to the back of the garden, I chatted to the following Spectator personnel, and in roughly the following order: Clarke Hayes, Mark Mason (newly met), the great Liz Anderson (very recently retired, currently taking French lessons in Menton), Alexander Chancellor the Great, Laura Atkins, Fraser Nelson, Ferdinand Mount (with a clumsy bandage flapping from his nose, which made me laugh, because he has the type of face I can’t help associating with an intelligent East End villain), Harry Mount, Molly Guinness, Mary Wakefield, Sam Leith (our new literary editor, three sheets to the wind), and a very wonderful, and wonderfully drunk American woman (raised in the Central African Republic in the Bokassa years), who is newly arrived at The Spectator from the Wall Street Journal, and whose name I stupidly couldn’t retain. And there, seated at the wrought-iron table at the end of the garden, surrounded by three lovely young daughters, was the man whose career we’d all come to celebrate — our retiring literary editor, Mark Amory.