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.