Tatler

The Diary: Catherine Ostler

By Catherine Ostler


By the time I arrived at Tatler magazine seven months ago, to become the new editor, plans for its 300th anniversary party were very much in motion. The venue, Lancaster House, opposite Clarence House, was already booked. Under its former name of Stafford House it was the scene of the very first party photographed for the Bystander pages (as Tatler’s party section has long been called), “a fete given by the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland” in 1901. The caterer, By Word of Mouth, had been chosen. Smythson were primed to print the invitations. On we charged, with guest lists, addresses, calligraphy.
Out went the stiffies. And just as we waved them off with our blessing, heaving a collective sigh of relief, two things became apparent. First; that no one replies to invitations any more. (Myself included – though I am determined to reform.) Second; that the Royal part should be removed from Royal Mail immediately. It simply doesn’t deserve it. The postal strike meant that about half of the invitations never arrived, offending politicians, actresses, tycoons and hacks across the land. Those that did receive them seemed to reply on the day of the party, and then asked if they could bring five friends.
Others kept changing their minds about whether to make an appearance. Particularly a few prominent Tories, who decided at the last minute that to be photographed inside a palace, in front of a giant champagne fountain, in the presence of 12 Bystander men dressed in frockcoats holding trays of Louis Roederer and pointing the way to the caviar room might have given the impression that we weren’t all in this together. I blame the party’s director of communications, that populist puritan Andy Coulson. He’s now known inside the Conservative party as Mr Tickle, because he’s always trying to rein in the fun.
It does seem joyously perverse to throw a shamelessly extravagant party – without so much as a whisper of charitable justification – in these baffling times. But the 300th anniversary of Tatler’s first issue in 1709, and the publication of our special November issue (ironically, its cover is the picture of the Queen taken for the postage stamp. But just to be clear: this is in tribute to Her Majesty, not to those scoundrels at Royal Mail) to mark the occasion, was too good an excuse. The staff produced the biggest issue in the magazine’s chequered history. Condé Nast’s managing director Nicholas Coleridge, who himself started on Tatler in 1979 and was labelled by its then editor Tina Brown as “the finest of the Young Turks”, frequently refers to it as “the title that bankrupted 10 proprietors” – at which point I usually find an excuse to back out of his office. Busy, busy!
Trawling through the archive was both a treat and a distraction; we lost hours wading through Cecil Beaton photographs and decades of party pictures that chronicled the way they lived then. Churchill’s wedding to Clementine Hozier; Wallis Simpson, eternally ruthless in Chanel; Vivien Leigh, before and after the madness; and the dawn of Diana. Gradually, it became apparent that Tatler’s archive offered an alternative history of England, away from the battlefield. Journalist and wit (and former soldier, and future MP) Richard Steele, with his collaborators Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, caught the spirit of Tatler when they launched it in the coffee houses around St. James’s.
To be funny in its satire it had to be both frivolous and serious. It was so controversial that 20 months later it died the first of many deaths, a victim of political pressure. Many buccaneers had a go over the centuries, my personal favourite, Guy Wayte, a convicted conman. This spiv in co-respondent shoes bought Tatler in 1968, by which time he was already known to the judiciary, the police and the press as “the man who duped Mayfair.”
Three centuries after it was born, that blend of gossip and investigation (it’s always been part peacock, part ferret) remains. Thus in our anniversary issue, alongside glossy pictures of It girls we feature the faded grandeur of Britain’s dukes united at Wilton’s restaurant in Jermyn Street and Boris Johnson’s confession that the secret of his success is two sharp pints at lunchtime. While some staff were ringing the stately homes of England persuading their elderly Graces to make it up to town, others were persuading London’s fashion designers to create dresses out of Union Jacks and filling Althorp with fake snow for a 1709-themed fashion shoot. The windows of Bond Street and Sloane Street lit up with Tatler covers past and present. Moschino turned covers into toddlers, adding tiny arms and legs. Gucci did a through-the-keyhole view of suspended Tatler issues. Louis Vuitton put the dress they designed for our 1709 shoot against a backdrop of gold birthday candles, almost like a bed of nails.
And so it came to the hour of the party. I always find that there is a strange moment near the beginning of parties when an unpredictable smattering of people are thrown together by virtue of being the only ones to have arrived on time. In this instance, in unbelievably gilded surroundings, it was James Purnell and Shelley von Strunckel, forced into an unlikely alliance. Could the astrologer see what I see – which is that Purnell seems to be that rare thing, a Labour politician who had the courage to act on what everyone was thinking, and in time could win back middle class voters?
On the Tory side, Samantha Cameron and Frances Osborne turned up looking glamorous and Andrew Feldman, their secret fundraising weapon, charmed potential donors. Beauties included Lagerfeld muse and FT contributor Amanda Harlech with her daughter, Tallulah Ormsby-Gore; And such much-photographed Tatler favourites as Amber Le Bon, Pippa Middleton and Peaches Geldof as well as young swan heiresses such as Tatiana Mountbatten and Philippa Cadogan. An age-defying Rupert Everett turned heads with his friend Michael Roberts, Vanity Fair fashion director, who was sporting a Dickensian tweed cap. Philip Green was photographed with two Tatler staff draped over him on a sofa; Stuart Rose was in his element, no doubt checking out the dresses.
Tatler might be 300, but there is something of the eternal child in the mix. Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele used to write under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, which meant they could get away with murder. In the spirit of such juvenilia, Tatler’s birthday cake had to be of cartoon-like giant proportions. I had the honour of walking it in, flanked by Bystander men, accompanied by the Ronnie Scott’s house band playing “Happy Birthday”.
I am not a tall person, and even though the cake was on the floor and I was on a stage, it was a bit of a struggle to reach those candles. At least I didn’t have to jump out of it.
In the midst of the party one guest asked me what, exactly, was the meaning of the word Tatler? As I was groping around in the dark muttering about gossip, Emma Soames, Winston Churchill’s granddaughter and a former Tatler editor, stepped in and said, “Think of it as the 18th-century version of Twitter!” Tatler, Twitter, people’s appetite for the antics of others never changes. In the words of the first Tatler editor, Bickerstaff, “Whate’re men do, or say, or think, or dream/Our motley paper seizes for its theme.”

Catherine Ostler is the editor of Tatler