Nicholas Coleridge

The Victoria and Albert Museum kindly threw me a leaving party after eight years as chair, plus a particularly apt present: a specially commissioned illuminated V&A logo made from powder-coated steel by the designer Toby Albrow. The logo is a reference to my megalomaniacal taste for giant logos atop museum buildings. We have placed a huge one on the roof of the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, and an even bigger one – 20 feet high – on the new V&A East in Stratford, visible from three miles away in Canary Wharf. What an exhilarating and happy gig the V&A has been. I’m going to miss it and the people. They hung my leaving portrait in the directorate corridor six weeks early, just to remind me it was over.

We have been on a family holiday to Tangier, Morocco, and of course my mobile phone came too. Not that I was intending to use it much – minimum impulse roaming; I would mostly wait until we had wifi for the purposes of Instagram and the rest of it. And I don’t tend to use the telephone bit at all. We had been at the villa two days when the barrage began – text after text, email after email, all from O2. I can’t pretend I am someone who can tell one service provider from another, but I know I am ‘with’ O2, and suddenly they were all over me. ‘Hello,’ their texts began. ‘From the way you have been using your phone, it looks like you might be abroad. Call us straight away so we can make sure your phone isn’t lost or stolen.

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee pageant was officially launched last week, with a splashy press call in the Raphael Court of the V&A. I happen to be co-chair of the pageant, to be held in June next year, alongside the eventmeister Sir Michael Lockett. The Raphael Gallery felt like an appropriate setting, since the seven glorious cartoons, considered the most important Renaissance paintings outside the Vatican, belong to the Queen on longstanding loan. Jubilees are a peculiarly British thing, applauding monarchs for their decades of service, full of ceremony and fiesta; a national celebratory parade through the streets of Westminster and down the Mall to Buckingham Palace.

I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked her, everyone did, and I find it hard to reconcile the Ghislaine I knew with the heinous crimes of which she now stands accused. I visited her several times at Headington Hall, her family house on the edge of Oxford, when her father Robert Maxwell was at the height of his power. It was a peculiar house, rented from the council, like an enormous municipal town hall. The entrance hall and corridors were lined with at least a hundred framed cartoons by Jak and Mac of the great narcissist newspaper owner. The spare bedrooms had buzzing minibar fridges like in a hotel.

This piece was first published in the '190 years of The Spectator' special. 15 March 1986 It is difficult to estimate the number of young investment bankers, stockbrokers and commodity brokers earning £100,000 a year. Perhaps there are only a couple of thousand, but they are so mobile and noisy that they give the impression of being far more numerous. Most are aged between 26 and 34, and two years ago they were being paid £25,000, in some cases even less, until the opening up of the City markets precipitated an epidemic of headhunting and concomitant salaries. In this respect they resemble the lucky winners on Leslie Crowther’s television quiz The Price is Right, in which a random selection of wallies get the chance to win microwave ovens and Clairol foot spas.

190 years of The Spectator   15 March 1986   It is difficult to estimate the number of young investment bankers, stockbrokers and commodity brokers earning £100,000 a year. Perhaps there are only a couple of thousand, but they are so mobile and noisy that they give the impression of being far more numerous. Most are aged between 26 and 34, and two years ago they were being paid £25,000, in some cases even less, until the opening up of the City markets precipitated an epidemic of headhunting and concomitant salaries. In this respect they resemble the lucky winners on Leslie Crowther’s television quiz The Price is Right, in which a random selection of wallies get the chance to win microwave ovens and Clairol foot spas.