The house may be a bargain — but how about the Chippendale to go with it?
Spring sunshine encourages us all to browse estate agents’ windows. This week’s featured property, Dumfries House, looks at first glance like a rare example of value for money in an overheated market. This exquisite mid-18th-century mansion designed by Robert and John Adam comes with 1,940 acres — yet for the same price, £6.75 million, from the same agent, Savills, you could buy nothing more than a five-bedroomed townhouse with a 30ft garden in Pelham Crescent, South Kensington.
There are, however, some drawbacks to Dumfries House, leaving aside the obvious one that it’s nowhere near Dumfries, so your removal van may never find it. The estate is in fact in east Ayrshire, near Cumnock, a bleak former mining community which claims the Labour party pioneer Keir Hardie and the football manager Bill Shankly as its most distinguished sons — so it doesn’t come with quite the same social cachet as Pelham Crescent. Nor, more importantly, does it come with the unique collection of furniture that was made for it, mostly by Chippendale — for which, if you want to keep it in situ, you’ll have to bid up to £14 million at Christie’s in July; a single rosewood bookcase is expected to break records by going under the hammer for £4 million.
If you’re still not put off, be prepared for delicate negotiations with the seller, the 7th Marquess of Bute and 27th Earl of Dumfries — and whatever you do, don’t address him by these or his several other lordly titles. Having spent most of his adult life trying to shun his aristocratic inheritance, he prefers to be known as ‘Johnny Bute’, having been ‘Johnny Dumfries’ during his 1980s motor-racing career. Savills seem to have cajoled him into doing some PR for the sale, but he’s not an easy man to talk to, as I discovered when he first started selling heirlooms in 1996. On that occasion — to the dismay of the Scottish heritage establishment which had revered his father, the 6th Marquess — it was £6 million worth of art and furniture from Mount Stuart, the family’s Victorian Gothic palace on the Isle of Bute. Commissioned to track him down and quiz him about the sale, I finally secured his private numbers in London from a Bute family connection and faxed a polite letter offering lunch. My phone rang instantly. ‘How d’you get my number?’ snarled a strangely un-posh voice. ‘From my editor,’ I lied. ‘You’re lying.’ ‘Oh well, would you like to talk anyway?’ ‘No.’ The line went dead.
Among the many people in Scotland I talked to about the 1996 sale, a common concern was that ‘Johnny’ would one day sell the Dumfries Chippendale; the hope, even then, was that house and contents would pass intact to the National Trust for Scotland. But protracted negotiations for just such a transfer broke down, for reasons on which Trust officials are sworn to secrecy. Clearly there’s more to this story — but not much point in ringing Johnny and asking for details.
Missing minutes
‘Brown lost £2 billion selling UK’s gold’ was an odd choice of headline to upstage the Wills-and-Kate split on the front page of the Sunday Times, since it wasn’t really news at all. Indeed, it’s fair to say that over the past five years the Spectator has regularly highlighted the cost of the Chancellor’s 1999 decision to flog off more than half of Britain’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market. In December 2005, for example, I estimated the loss, rather precisely, at £1,736,352,941, and since the gold price has risen by a third since then, the big number certainly now starts with a 2, even allowing for a return on the euros in which the goldsales proceeds were reinvested. What was newsworthy in the Sunday Times story, however, was the revelation that Brown ignored warnings from Bank of England officials and market professionals that the sale would backfire. As with the £5 billiona-year pension-fund stealth tax, the Treasury has resisted attempts to drag into the public domain the papers recording these dissenting opinions. Well, they would, wouldn’t they — because this decision will go down in history as pure folly based on ignorance of markets, without even the poor excuse offered for the pension tax raid that, though it contradicted official advice, it was a still a cunning wheeze to help pay for public services. I’m submitting a Freedom of Information Act request for the minutes of any Whitehall meeting on any subject in the past decade at which the Chancellor announced a policy decision, received contrary advice from civil servants, thanked them courteously for it, and changed his decision accordingly.
So it goes
I must have been 16 when an American backpacker, travelling in England while waiting to hear whether he was going to be drafted for Vietnam, lent me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle — with its unforgettable image of the oceans freezing because a Nobel scientist had invented ‘Ice-9’, a crystal that caused water to solidify at a higher temperature, in response to a Marine Corps general’s demand to ‘do something about mud’. I’ve been a devotee of Vonnegut’s satirical fantasies ever since, and when he died last week, aged 84, I was intrigued to see references in his obituaries to a brief career in the motor trade. Unlikely as it may seem, this whimsical, chain-smoking pessimist once owned a Saab dealership on Cape Cod. It was in the 1950s, when the only model exported by the Swedish aircraft-company-turned-carmaker was the cramped, two-door Saab 93 — which had a two-stroke engine, a thirst for oil and, as Vonnegut put it, a tendency to ‘lay down a smokescreen like a destroyer in a naval engagement’. To Americans of the newly affluent society about which J.K. Galbraith was writing at the time — and whose ideal car was a V8 Cadillac Fleetwood the size of a small house — the Saab was not an attractive alternative. Vonnegut, one imagines, was too whimsical a salesman to change their minds. He went out of business, and wrote many years later: ‘I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature.’ Shame on them.
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