The whole tent stank of kippers

Lady Elizabeth Anson ‘numbers President William Jefferson Clinton, Hans Heinrich Thyssen Bornemisza, Mrs Henry John Heinz, the late Mr Alfred Heineken, Princess Esra Jah, Mrs Basil Hersov, Mr John Paul Getty II, Mr Galen Weston, the then Mr and Mrs Tom Cruise, Mr Donald Trump and Mrs Ivana Trump and the University of Boston among her international clientele’. It is a glorious list, matched by an almost equally exotic list of British clients, ranging from nearly every member of the royal family to Sir Clive Sinclair and the late Mr Derek Nimmo. Lady Elizabeth has spent the last 43 years working for ‘the very rich, the very idle, the very busy and the ones who simply haven’t got a clue what to do’, as she herself put it when she gave me tea last week. She organises their parties for them, which, in the words of the two-page biography of herself which she hands out, ‘are always distinctive. The themes have included jungles, the 1920s, a circus, the French Revolution …and even an Up Pompeii-style Roman rout.’

The material is worthy of Evelyn Waugh or Craig Brown, and would certainly, in the right hands, form a very funny television series. Yet throughout these 43 years the comic aspect of Lady Elizabeth’s work, of which she herself is keenly aware, has seldom received the attention it deserves. In newspaper articles she is always described as ‘the Queen’s cousin’, which is accurate – they both had Bowes-Lyon mothers – but tends to skew the picture. These faltering notes are an attempt to begin to put the balance right.

All sorts of things can go wrong at a party, which is one reason why people hire someone like Lady Elizabeth to take care of the arrangements. I am sure that things go wrong less often at the parties she runs than at most people’s, for she keeps abreast of the latest technology and has what in military circles would be called ‘grip’.