Dressed to Thrill
27 November 2009
The current issue of that journal of record Finch’s Quarterly Review, which I am proud to edit, on behalf of its eponymous proprietor carries an editorial, in which I called for the Conservatives to be more tweedy than Twitter. I quote: “I think that it falls to the Tories to lead the way in bringing more of a touch of the grouse moor and the stately home into political life.”
Of course I did not expect David Cameron to get into his breeches and Barbour to pose for one those ‘candid’ photographs of him in full man of the people mode: in this case perfecting his right and left at woodcock. However, I am happy, no that is not true, thrilled to bits, to see that Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the county of Durham is obviously a keen reader of Finch’s Quarterly Review, feeling that what New Labour needed was a bit of big gun gravitas he has been spotted as a guest, if not a gun, at a shooting party at Waddesdon.
If only we had known Peter’s passion for fieldsports we could have invited him to the key sporting fixture of the year: Finch & Partners’ annual clay pigeon shoot. It was a triumph and another giant step forward in the cult of the personality that I am developing around Charles: seeing him do press-ups while waiting to shoot gladdened my heart (and probably improved his cardiovascular health as well) – he must safeguard his health for his own and indeed the greater good.
It was a keenly fought competition for the big prize of the day, but in reality there was never really any doubt about who would win. Yes that is right; both Tom Stubbs and myself were awarded best dressed man – Tom had adopted a sort of cheroot-smoking, riding-boot-wearing, Brioni-meets-High-Plains-Drifter look; while I had decided to come dressed as Edmondo di Robilant in an absolutely perfect suit of vintage Foulkes tweed from the old Hunters of Brora mill cut for me during the mid-1990s by the peerless Terry Haste.
Even if I snatched the best dressed prize from him, it is hard to feel too sorry for Edmondo. After all not only is he in possession of a wife who doubles as FQR’s in-house domestic goddess, the fragrant Maya Even, a collection of shoes made for his father by Gatto of Rome and a noble title of such antiquity that he makes Romulus and Remus seem like a pair of parvenu arrivistes; I also allowed him to win the shooting element of last year’s match – my magnanimity in missing almost every single clay that presented itself to me (including stationary ones that were left lying on the grass) was, I am sure you will agree, remarkable. Any way, even if he did not carry off best dressed this year, he might have felt himself in with a chance of retaining the Asprey shooting trophy.
But he was reckoning without my friend art collector and philanthropist Spas Roussev, who had assembled a team and then had flown in from Sofia expressly to captain them at this top sporting event. Spas claimed never to have seen a firearm before in his life and yet he managed to hit every single target.
But if that was impressive it was nothing compared to the record of his teammate, HRH Prince Nikolaos of Greece. Nikolaos is a lovely man, far more charming than any member of a royal family has any reason to be and gallant to boot: he presented Rachel Johnson editrix of the Lady with his 007-esque recoil pad and she promptly swooned on the spot. Any way Nikolaos is a man who could shoot the eyebrows off a moving woodcock at night in a blizzard at 300 yards, while sound asleep – he was shooting so well that not only was he hitting every clay, he was also amusing himself by hitting the larger fragments as they fell to earthwards.
And if you thought that was sensational then you should have seen the saturnine man impeccably clad in a business suit, who neither confirmed nor denied that he had been the chief marksman of the Bulgarian secret service. He would normally average four or five clays with a single barrel and on the final drive he memorably despatched all 64 clays without discharging a single shot. Unsurprisingly Spas’s team scored a staggering 6,072 kills out of a possible 200. With a record like that I am pretty sure that by the time you read this, Gordon Brown will have offered them all a peerage as part of Mandelson’s new guns for gongs programme.
As for me, deprived for yet another year of the Top Gun prize, I sought solace in the company of the many beautiful women who were shooting and insisted on being photographed with that pair of glamour kittens Astrid Munoz and Mrs Charles Finch.
