Thursday 25^th March 2010

A Tate Private View is unsurpassed. I never thought to achieve two in as many months – Chris Ofili in January; on Monday, Henry Moore, owing to the property outfit for which my friend, Peter Acharya, works sponsoring it.

Flowers ten feet in the air, stage lighting, unceasing canapés and champagne. Queens must have been at work. But it is a manly affair as we shall see. When planning, executives were only interested in the champagne aspect and contrived many tastings, I am told.

Property must be looking up. In fact it is. Peter Acharya said so. Last year this company only ran to a funny little exhibition of one or two paintings by Constable at the National Portrait Gallery.

Surveyors, lawyers, contractors, all men with large hands.  The bit of the Duveen Gallery under the dome and the vast adjoining room where Beata Beatrix hangs – seething, seething with men. Almost as many grey suits as at that Tory Party rally I went to with the Multis. This is the property world. Only a handful of women, all dead-ringers for the one who sits beside Alan Sugar in The Apprentice.

Now, if you want to comprehend truly Poor Little Rich Gays, study The Apprentice – for it is the exact opposite.

I saw two men outside, arriving together by taxi. Straight men when paired in public have a barely perceptible rigidity, a slightly higher than required angle to the chin, which wards off  mis-understanding.

Our party is different: an artist, a restaurateur or chef or owner of nursing homes or all three, a scion of a department store who has never worked or not much, a make-up artist and a lady of 85 with superb ash-blonde coiffure and grey satin party dress, said to drive a over-land vehicle down Marylebone High Street causing a sensation on the pavement.

We meet the Chairman of the Stock Exchange, grey suit, 60-odd, who says: ‘The exhibition’s well worth a look. Only drawback – downstairs and no food or drink.’ The ash-blonde lady of 85 is very soigné, back and forth with the Chairman of the Stock Exchange, evidently very much her tea’s cup. Then we have the PA to Stephen Hester, Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. She says, ‘Hang on to your RBS shares.’

The make-up artist and I recall the time Elizabeth Arden hurled Estee Lauder, still in curlers and pink gown, out of her salon in the Place Vendome

I have Estee’s autobiography. It is called A Success Story.  Never published here, owing to being beyond belief, I should imagine. I must tell you about it one day.