As the editor’s brief for this column is ‘Fomo-inducing’, I must push the boat out for my debut and am thus nominating my Parties of the Year before the festive season is under way – which is a bit like poor Rory Stewart saying Kamala Harris would win comfortably just before Donald Trump turned every swing state red. But I’m calling it anyway.
These winners, I tell you, are bashes that will be remembered long after the guests are pushing up daisies, although they need a Chips Channon, an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a di Lampedusa to do them full justice. And they are?
First up we have – or had – ‘1974’ to celebrate the half-century of Lord and Lady Bamford’s union. The invitation was At Home at Daylesford, in glossiest Gloucestershire, so the 600 guests purred their way up a sinuous drive towards the honey-stoned Cotswold pile, their path to pleasure accessorised by matching sets of automobiles: dozens upon dozens of Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Bentleys and so on, all placed at exactly the same cheeky angle and lit with a spotlight set near the rear wheel. ‘Maybe we each get one in a party bag later,’ my husband mused as we snaked past a suite of 30 identical white Porsches.
The Bamfords had erected for this one night a dazzling pavilion of lights, a lakeside Taj Mahal to their love, with a huge neon sign ‘FIFTY YEARS TOGETHER’ atop. Carole’s attention to detail meant we were all sent along with our stiffy a mood board of looks to inspire our 1970s outfits, i.e. for the girls Bianca Jagger braless in a white suit, Talitha Getty sprawling on a roof in Marrakech; for the boys Mick Jagger, Serge Gainsbourg and James Bond.
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