Jan Moir: Not just Sam Cam's 'cottage' that looks shabby
Ooh, look at the muck in here, as Larry Grayson used to say. Photographs of David and Samantha Cameron’s Cotswolds home reveal soot marks soaring up the sitting room walls from her scented candles and a rather â€" can we be candid? â€" grubby hearth.
Regarding Sam’s domestic mess makes me itch, itch, itch to tackle her stains with a dry sponge and some rubbing alcohol, then plug in Lakeland’s Turbo Scrubber to give that fireplace the fright of its life.
But readers, surely that is the essential difference between Sam and me. She is posh and clearly believes a little bit of dirt and grime adds character to a home, while I am extremely very non-posh, with a collection of grout-cleaning brushes and a long-reach, extendable ostrich-feather duster just like the one in Downton Abb ey.
Grubby chic: One of the Cameron's Cotswolds interiors that Jan Moir would give a good scrub
The September issue of Harper's Bazaar includes an exclusive interview with Samantha Cameron and showcases her idyllic Cotswolds home
Sam is above stairs with the gentry, a waxy gardenia behind her ear as she muddies the carpets in her Jazz Age shoes and leaves ring marks on the mahogany; I am downstairs in a mob cap, beet-faced as I boil her napkins and clean the copper asparagus platters with whipped egg whites and elbow grease. That’s just the way it is, and always will be.
Indeed, Sam is so posh she calls her lovely home a cottage, when we lower orders can clearly see that her three-storey mansion is half a Hogwarts, at least. Still, who would have guessed her tastes were quite so vanilla, or that she was such a devotee of shabby chic, emphasis on the shabby?
No longer afraid of the beady gaze of the electorate and keen to promote her new ra nge of clothes, SamCam has opened the doors of her family home to the glossy magazine Harper’s Bazaar.
The delicious new images reveal clouds of pink roses climbing up her brick walls, lots of French doors leading into the gardens and, yes, a beige-on-beige sitting room complete with throws, sofas, fairy lights and scented candles.
‘To be honest, the house is slightly falling down, the windows are rotting and the roof needs replacing, but it is lovely,’ she said. Understating one’s good fortune is the first and last resort of the privileged, and she is a mistress of the art.
While her husband was still in office, baronet’s daughter Samantha always took pains to play down her elemental poshness and his ’n’ hers discreet wealth.
A few years ago, photographs of her refurbished family kitchen at Downing Street revealed a carefully curated back drop of John Lewis saucepans, Ikea cabinets and a Habitat wall clock; very little that spoke of riches or prestige, nothing that would incite a class riot on the streets.
For in these socially divided times, one must do what has to be done to avoid the fusillade of flaming pitchforks that any display of ostentatious wealth might bring. You can’t even own a second home within a five-mile radius of Grenfell Tower without being accused of monstrous greed and the oppression of the poor, even if you have worked every day of your life to buy that home.
For Mrs Cameron, this reverse snobbery persecution meant High Street heels, budget holidays and dresses from Marks & Spencer.
But now David has left politics to write a memoir no one will read, whay-hey! It’s time to crack open the £265 fireside log basket and get one of the chars to run a comb over her £1,200 ten-skin sheepskin rug.
Posing in the garden in one of her £260 dresses, Sam has the air of a woman who can be herself at last and no longer cares what anyone thinks about her soft furnishings.
‘I was there as his wife, it wasn’t my gig,’ she has said of her husband’s time in office, although that is rather disingenuous, considering she did have her role to play.
The Camerons left Downing Street exactly a year ago and viewing their time at the top even from this short historical perspective is interesting. In comparison with the bumbling, crumpled Mays they suddenly seem a winning, confident, modern couple. I almost miss them!
He was persuasive, even earnest if the mood took him, while she was always elegant and polished. Attractive people are presumed to have special virtues and in this respect Samantha was a valued asset, hovering at her husband’s side like a wel l-groomed apparition, always making him look good.
She once said he only had sleepless nights over the Scottish referendum but was chillaxed about everything else. He could, she said, ‘rationalise himself out of a mental hole’.
Don’t you wish he had cared or worried just a little bit more? That is why some of the items on display chez Sam and Dave are rather jarring. Do you know what? It’s not the sooty walls that really bother me, it’s the suggestion that politics and David Cameron’s time as Prime Minister, not to mention the perilous course he took this country on, were all a bit of a laugh.
The full interview appears in the September issue of Harper's Bazaar on sale today
Come Through the Keyhole with me now and consider the copy of the Enid Blyton parody Five Go Mad On Brexit Island in the Camerons’ sitting room; a sign saying Calm Down Dear, It’s Only A Recession by their kitchen sink; and a sniggersome Alison Jackson print showing a lookalike ‘Tony Blair’ placing a bet on the election.
Please tell me it was something more than an extravagant joke to Samantha â€" and especially to David. Please prove that public office meant something bigger than a means to an end, a chore to be ticked off on a bucket list before retreating behind their rose-covered walls to drink tea from their ironically mismatched bone china cups, while we all suffer the consequences.
For that is not chic, but it is very shabby.
- The full interview appears in the September issue of Harper's Bazaar on sale today
Every little thing they do isn't magicÂ
Pictured in a St Tropez nightclub this week, the grizzled but still game old-timers looked like a vodka-pickled couple on their first Tinder date
Sting and Trudie should be the ageing but stylish, golden-hued twin symbols of enduring love and triumphant long-term marriage â€" but they’re not, because they are Sting and Trudie.
Pictured in a St Tropez nightclub this week, the grizzled but still game old-timers looked like a vodka-pickled couple on their first Tinder date. She has just taken her dress off and is dancing in her slip, while he’s wondering if it’s too early for tongues.
Recently he said that they liked a ‘tawdry’ sex life and yes, yes, one can see the signs.
The couple, who celebrate their silver wedding anniversary this month, like to make a splash. Everything from their horseback, Versace-th emed wedding to their tantric sexcapades to the lush Italian estate where they go to ‘rediscover’ each other every year is a bit excruciating and rather too try-hard.
Are they the cringiest couple ever? It’s the kids I feel sorry for.
All the food you can tweet
Just when you thought restaurants couldn’t get any more ridiculous, along comes Core.
This new one by Gordon Ramsay protégé Clare Smyth has just opened in London’s Notting Hill. It offers tasting menus, including one for £95 (plus a bold 15 per cent service charge). Is she having a laugh?
Our menu included a potato course (half a small spud, titivated with a teaspoon of herring eggs), a carrot course (a bit of carrot dressed with lamb gubbins) and a skate course, featuring a thumb-sized piece of skate, one of the cheapest and unlov eliest of fish. Still hungry? Here comes the sorbet course, hurrah.
A dish on the new tasting menu from Gordon Ramsey protege Clare Smyth, with a carrot course
Naturally there is an open kitchen, where chefs use gilded tweezers to garnish these dwarf dishes with micro herbs while wearing the expression of someone performing open-heart surgery on a dying puppy. The main dish was a scallop (singular), which looked very pretty but was overcooked â€" perhaps the team were too busy ironing the petals of an edible gossamer pansy to notice.
A great number of restaurants have become so obsessed with profit margins that the food/turnover balance has become hopelessly corroded. It looked to me as if the raw ingredients for this tiresome ‘banquet’ couldn’t have cost much more than a fiver.
Is this what happens in a world where customers are more interested in taking photographs of their food than enjoying it? Sad if so .
The knives are out for Mary!
How can The Great British Bake Off complain Mary Berry has stolen its format for her new BBC show, Britain’s Best Cook?
Everyone knows the blessed St Mary can do no wrong. Ever. And surely GBBO itself was a near-copy of MasterChef, which was hardly original.
Amateurs being judged by professionals has been a TV staple since The Generation Game. Yet that hasn’t stopped GBBO challenging other shows such as The Big Painting Challenge and Hair, a BBC3 show that attempted to find the UK’s best hairdresser but soon lost its bounce.
Perhaps the whingers should just try to make their own doomed C4 show a success.
We can all sleep a little safer in our beds tonight, for the three would-be jihadists who dubbed themselves the Three Musketeers (plus another conspirator) have been jailed for life for plotting a mass-casualty attack on a police or military target in the UK.
Old Bailey judge Mr Justice Globe said the men were gripped by a ‘radical, violent ideology’. When police arrested them they found weapons including a meat cleaver wit h ‘kafir’(infidel) scratched on the blade, and a partially constructed pipe bomb.
Terrifying. Yet two female jurors didn’t quite see it that way. During the trial they giggled and discussed a handsome police officer in the case. One even had a conversation with him along the lines of ‘my mate fancies you’.
It seems that even terrorism is a bit of a lark to some of today’s self-obsessed nincompoops.
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