Vintage Tony
Taki Gstaad About 20 years or so ago, Tony Lambton, the mother of my children and I drove from Siena to Florence in my brand-new Audi Quattro. Our destination was La Pietra, Sir Harold Acton's Florentine marvel of a villa, where the great man was expecting us for lunch. It was Tony's idea that Acton should meet the Speccie's High life correspondent. While I was putting the Audi through its paces, Tony, sitting in the back, kept repeating in his high-pitched, nasal voice, 'Isn't Taki good-lookinnnnn he's so good-lookinnnnn ' Obviously embarrassed, I begged him to stop but on he went. Once in Florence we stopped at a chemist, for his lordship needed some pills. Alexandra and I waited in the car in air-conditioned comfort. 'Isn't Tony great?' I asked the wife. 'He sure is, but all the time he was saying how good-looking you are he was trying to put his hand up my skirt ... '
It was pure Tony Lambton. A cheap feel took precedence over friendship, and why not? Anything to shock. I first met him in 1957, at the Agnellis, and I was not yet 21. 'Do you masturbate a lot?' was the first thing he said to me in front of lots of people I hardly knew. I turned red and furious. In a trembling voice which gave me away, I lied that I never did that sort of thing. 'Well, I do,' he said. 'Especially when I go on a long plane trip ... ' It was the start of a long friendship.
Both the Profumo and Lambton scandals had an irony about them. The soi-disant frigid English male pumping away in a glorious macho way with prostitutes, in Tony's case simultaneously with two of them. Atta boy, Tony. Compare that with the ludicrous Bill Clinton, getting it up with Miss Goodyear Tyre in the Oval Office.
There was a lusty abandon about the Lambton scandal. Only Ted Kennedy could match it, but, unlike in the fat Irishman's case, no one died with Lambton or Profumo. My then young children called him Lorlambton, one word, and he once sold me a house next to his Tuscan property. I literally gave it back to him after one season, asking for nothing in return. The trouble was his mistress. Too hysterical and unpleasant for me. The place was also much too hot in summer. But I will remember Tony with great affection, for his wit, his humour and troublestirring, not to mention his ability to be both totally cynical and yet loyal, as in the case of Diana Mosley and countless others. He once told me while lolling around his pool that George Weidenfeld was the hairiest man he had ever seen, and that when a large ape had escaped from a nearby zoo, some carabinieri had mistaken George for the ape and almost shot dead the publisher. I thought it extremely amusing but I didn't believe a word of it. Tony insisted. In fact he was so convincing, I wrote about it in these here pages in August of 1988.
Needless to say, it was totally made up. Lord Weidenfeld, it turns out, has absolutely no hair on his back or on his chest, for that matter, and no ape had escaped from any zoo except the one in Tony's mind. Weidenfeld was not best pleased but he forgave me. Tony was furious with the publisher because he had just come out with a book attacking Diana Mosley, so he got the Greek idiot to write a column ridiculing Lord W. It was vintage Tony, and he also managed to involve two grand ladies — no longer with us — who supposedly ran up to the Italian fuzz and begged for the ape's life to be spared. Although it was grand guignol, I fell for it until a solicitor's letter arrived at 56 Doughty Street setting me straight.
As a lady wrote in the Daily Telegraph, 'In an age where spin doctors outnumber sheep, and you would not believe Tony Blair if he told you the world was round, it is rather refreshing to hear of an MP who was caught with his pants down and actually admitted it.' Actually, most people don't care if a politician screws around. Most people screw around. I remember how the pompous Robin Day asked Lambton why he needed to use prostitutes as he already had a wife and a mistress. Why not, was the answer, if one still feels like it. Robin Day was a grabbing type, the kind that clasped a girl's thigh while in a taxi, pretending to have fallen over as it swerved. He was shocked, shocked to find out that Tony was double-dealing. But he doubledealt openly, and that's why he was so special, and the Robin Days of this world are not.
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