The Ritz Hotel is a cake on Piccadilly made of stone; inside this cake, Lady Thatcher died. Some think it is tragic that she died here in the cake of stone; I do not. It has Italian men in tailcoats, a gifted pastry chef, and views of Green Park; she chose, I suspect, the ultimate free-market death. I would have chosen the Connaught for my slightly more social-democratic death, but this is suitable for Lady Thatcher; it is for hot blonde chicks who love swagger and flounce, and imagine a country wrapped in chintz and whisky and power. Lady Thatcher was a girl first, a politician later; her closest twin is surely the novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford, who writes about ambition, betrayal and sex, and who, if she were a hotel, would be the Ritz Hotel.
Inside, it is fascinatingly pink. I have always thought the Ritz is fascinating; it is so complete under its stern mansard roof, with the buses to Kensington racing past, that you wonder if it simply landed fully formed from outer space and may one day fly off again. The corridor has every pink, with gold and loitering palms, and there is a secretive pianist, and people just hanging about, looking happier than they do outside because the Ritz hotel is an imago, an idea of how you imagine yourself to be, and it is completely narcotic. Here I can only think of female Margaret, with her scents and her silks and her seething clouds of Elnett hairspray, who should have been a gay icon (but wasn’t, due to Section 28), saying: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my green chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my hair softly waved … the Iron Lady of the western world? Me?’ The Ritz appealed to her romanticism, obviously; in a way it almost looks like her.
The dining room is vast, pink, gold and very thickly carpeted; there are painted clouds and columns, and large round tables widely spaced, and curtains that cost more than diamond necklaces. No fame or explicit narcissism or small dogs here — just money; tribes of money whispering and planning and kissing and eating tiny meringues although the set luncheon is a fine £47 per head. My colleague Charles Moore says the Thatchers dined at the Ritz because the chef didn’t tell Denis Thatcher he had to eat his steak rare, and Denis Thatcher didn’t have to engage in the sort of battle where his arsenal included the line, ‘Send it back when it isn’t mooing.’ (This reminds me of my grandfather. He used to draw a cow on the ballot paper every general election.) In this, I agree with Denis Thatcher: a chef who tells me how to eat a steak is a chef I will stab with my fork. There is no such nonsense here.
The food is faultless, and smartly served; domes are removed from plates in unison and so forth; I make chaos with my cutlery and look bewildered, and it is rearranged with smiles and bows. Pea soup is heaped with froth, and has truffle oil inside — delicious. Lamb is sweet and fine, and the puddings are divine — tiny cylinders of sugar, cubes of mousse.
Soon it is 4 p.m., and I have not left. What is this? Poppy fields of stone? A gentleman comes, and takes us to William Kent house, a mysterious 18th-century annexe next door. He shows us wallpapers and curtains and staircases and balustrades and cushions and a suite, the only empty one in the hotel, he says. It is two rooms in gold and blue, so clean and bright you can see the clouds drifting above Bond Street. I think instantly of what Benjamin Disraeli said when he entered the House of Lords — ‘I am dead! Dead but in the Elysian Fields!’
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