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.
Not everyone met the brief, even though the British tend to smash these occasions. Hugh (aka ‘Hunter’) van Cutsem came in Bjorn Borg-style short shorts, which offended the arbiter elegantorum, Nicky Haslam. ‘If the Bamfords ask one to a party, one dresses up,’ he said. During the speeches, Lord B apologised about the drive. ‘The cars,’ he explained. ‘It’s just an extension of my school stamp collection really.’
Then Carole – in a purple feathered headdress – said a few charming words and waved an arm. Black curtains swirled open behind her to reveal a homuncular Van Morrison in a black trilby – and the rest is a bit of a blur. At one point I was belting out ‘Into the Mystic’ between Simon Le Bon and Bob Geldof, a mere metre from the Man; at another Nile Rogers was on stage and I was mum–dancing with Richard E. Grant to ‘Le Freak’ in a minidress (me, not him).
Withnail was quite the mover, mechanism not broken at all, in some patchwork trousers and platform boots he told me he’d had ‘since school’. After that I collapsed into a clump of oldies, one of whom had been, er, in the vicinity of Balmoral (I must be a little careful here) during the Starmer stay and was now basically braced for full-fat redistributive communism.
It wasn’t the last party,
of course. It never is, as the
rich are always with us
‘This is the LAST PARTY,’ they shouted in my ear, gesturing to the gorgeous waiting staff circulating with ciggies and espresso martinis, the film stars and former prime ministers in flares, the table with staggering beauties including Joan Collins and Liz Hurley and her son Damian. ‘You should write about this!’
After Ellie Goulding we had Lord Bamford himself DJ-ing with his pick of 1970s bangers, and after ‘Ant On Decks’ it really did go all Pete Tong.
It wasn’t the last party, of course. It never is, as the rich are always with us.
Last month, I flew back from Botswana for ‘Nuit Blanche’ at Castle Howard, the joint party given by Nick and Vicky Howard for the combined 100th birthday of mother and daughter, and the fabulousness was again unconfined.
The dress code was white and silver, which was unforgiving for anyone but the snake-hipped, smooth-skinned, bright young things in backless white satin gowns.
The Vanbrugh palace sparkled and dazzled as the gilded millennials drank and dined, then raved by the light of 2,000 wax candles. Blanche and her cohort almost brought the dome down into the Great Hall, so wild was their disco-dancing.
Cake was a teetering silver tower with an Alice in Wonderland label, saying ‘Dig in’. Blanche spooned it into everyone’s mouths while they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ as they filmed her, phones aloft – a reminder that nothing ever happens unless it’s posted on Instagram later.
It’s only November, but my verdict is final and the results are in: Carrie’s party for Boris’s 60th in Oxfordshire; Peter and Zara Simon’s joint birthday party in Ibiza.
But ‘1974’ and ‘Nuit Blanche’ are the two parties of the century – and best of all, unlike Jay Gatsby, who never went to his own, your columnist was at them all – apart from André Balazs’s decadent do for the tenth anniversary of Chiltern Firehouse, which I couldn’t make as I was on safari in the Okavango Delta. The Fomo is still terrible.
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