Snobbery, sneering and secret sniggers: the sad truth about the so-called ‘special relationship’

To the grand Herrera house on the upper east side of Manhattan for lunch in honour of Lord and Lady Linley. David Linley is over here to receive an award for his designs, which even a rube like myself where furniture is concerned finds wonderful. Princess Margaret’s son is talented, but he’s also a very nice man. His parents must have done something right, because he’s lived a scandal-free life (as has his sister) — something other British royals cannot claim. He also earns his own living, as rare among royals as a neoconservative marine.

Our hostess Carolina Herrera is the best fashion designer in America, by far. She and her husband were very close to Princess Margaret, and David and Serena stay with them whenever they’re in the Big Bagel. It was a fun lunch, with editors of glossy magazines, princes of no-longer-existing monarchies, a very pretty English lady assistant to Linley, and so on. She told me how Marie Christine of Kent once said of Linley, ‘Who cares what a carpenter thinks’, forgetting, as the fabulist who claims to be related to royals who are unaware of it tends to do when putting her ungainly foot in it, that Our Lord Jesus was a carpenter himself.

Looking around, it struck me that there were no Americans present. This was not by design, but in today’s money-comes-first society, some of our recently minted billionaires are not exactly house-trained, hence their absence. (They have little education, absolutely no taste and not the slightest perception of refinement or beauty.) Mind you, the English have always reserved their praise of Americans for dancing girls, blues singers and god-awful rappers, who offer British ‘artists’ no serious competition. I’m afraid this is true. There is a fundamental aversion in Britain to anything American, although the worse the product that comes out of the Home of the Depraved, the quicker the Brits adopt it.