Emma Soames The owner, chef Rowley Leigh, made his previous restaurant, Kensington Place, into a hot destination never out of top 10 lists of places to eat. When that opened in the Eighties it was regarded as terrifically cutting edge. With its shiny tables, hard flooring and minimalist chairs it also became known as one of the noisiest restaurants in London.
Café Anglais looks set to score another hit for Leigh. The food has been much praised and it is fashionably difficult to get a table in the evenings. Visually it is much more restrained than its predecessor – it has large, round upholstered booths peacefully set against the walls under cathedral-height windows.
It took me a couple of visits to work out quite why I so like it but I finally figured it: the restaurant is carpeted. The lower noise levels mean I didn’t walk out wondering if I needed a hearing test. So it’s baby boomer-friendly and proof that the boomers – Leigh is one – are finally designing things that make life just that little bit more agreeable. Nor, incidentally, does this softly, softly approach seem to be putting off the high-decibel-loving twentysomethings, so everyone’s happy.
It’s not what you say, it’s where you say it
I do not hesitate to add my tuppence worth to the great Sharia furore entirely created by ABC, as the Archbishop of Canterbury is known among the commentati. Leaving aside what he did, didn’t, meant or failed to say in that fabulously opaque speech, the problem is that there are certain positions from which people cannot comment as they might wish. So in reality it is not what he said, it is that he said it from Lambeth Palace. From those sacred battlements the Sharia word just doesn’t play and ABC is now suffering the powerful effects of role rage.
This is a phenomenon that I endured when I was Editor of that gloriously glamorous and charmingly lightweight magazine, Tatler. In the mid-Eighties the magazine published a detailed piece on the antics of the Duchess of York – this before most of the press had cottoned on to what a disastrous choice of royal bride she was.
As Editor, I was rather proud of the piece but when it was published it caused a terrific hullabaloo, both in royal circles and in the press. Figuratively speaking, I was sent to the back of the room in a dunce’s cap. Indeed, if the Tower of London had still been open for business I think I may have been invited to spend some time there.
I tried to defend my position by pointing out the truth of what the article said about the febrile Fergie – and indeed everything in it was subsequently proved to be true and it was often repeated elsewhere in the press. But when role rage kicks in, the truth is but a sideshow and an irrelevance.
The big problem was that the article appeared in Tatler, the house journal of the upper classes – and six months later I was fired.
A very special envoy
I have recently developed a soft spot for Paddy Ashdown. He has matured into a very wise man with a specialism (Bosnia, Afghanistan) and a fabulously laid-back attitude to the pesky demands of diplomacy, and the serpentine workings of international politics. But I suspect it took Ban Ki-moon’s finest techniques of seduction to lure Lord Ashdown out of retirement to become the UN’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan – and it can only have been a highly developed sense of duty that made him accept such a thankless, possibly dangerous and certainly tricky position.
But the cup passed from him as President Karzai refused to have our Paddy anywhere near Kabul – he feared his skill and experience would undermine his own fragile presidency. But Lord Ashdown’s only comment about this most flattering turn of events was suitably modest: “I’m very happy to go back to my garden and my grandchildren.”
A few weeks later he pops up as co-chairman of the Commission on National Security, part of the Institute of Public Policy Research, which has just published a clever paper about future threats to our safety. How’s that for retirement?