62 the spectator | 7 september 2019 | http://www.spectator.co.uk
LIFE
things, a fanatical Donald Trump fan.
Mappin was interviewed by Cornwall
Live, and he said that the helipad at
the Camelot Castle Hotel was always
waiting for Donald Trump, which
seems like a terrible fate for any hel-
ipad. Stourton’s ‘abstract Realist’ art,
meanwhile, is everywhere: splattered
on walls, reproduced in books bound
with gaffer tape and detailed in leaf-
lets calling him ‘more prolific than
Picasso’. There is a lot of bitching
about Stourton’s art on the Camelot
Castle Hotel TripAdvisor page, which
is a work of art in itself. Some guests
clearly consider themselves hos-
tages; others are dazzled. The lobby,
meanwhile, is decorated with photo-
graphs of Mappin attending film pre-
mieres and stalking famous ‘friends
of Camelot’. Al Pacino stares out,
sun-burnt and confused. Guests strug-
gle to drag cases through revolving
doors. They read leaflets about Map-
pin’s inspirational texts. He is into
‘spiritual technology’ — scientology.
They stare at Stourton’s exploding
floral paintings with furrowed brows.T
he Camelot Castle Hotel is a
pebble-dashed late-Victorian
excrescence on a cliff. It over-
looks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A
baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a
floral Aston Martin are parked out-
side. They are the owners’ cars. Eve-
ryone else is in a banger. This hotel
played the lunatic asylum in the 1979
Dracula starring Frank Langella, and
this is more apt than you can know.
Inside there is faded Victorian
grandeur mashed with Arthurian leg-
end mashed with Kazakh oil baron
chic mashed with three-star hotel in
fading south coast resort. There is sin-
ister tiling, dark wood, fraying carpets,
staff dressed for serving tea at some
ghostly parallel Claridge’s and, from
every window, the sea. It is so disori-
entating — I am used to smooth, grey,
efficient hotels — the result is thrilling.
It is so weird, like tumbling into cin-
ema. What might happen at the Over-
look — I mean the Camelot Castle
— Hotel?
The owners are the artist Ted
Stourton and John Mappin of the
Queen’s jewellers, who is, among other
The restaurant is called Irina’s
Restaurant (for Mappin’s wife) and it
contains a gaggle of hostages congrat-
ulating themselves on avoiding the
generic and over-priced English Herit-
age café at the ruins of Tintagel below;
that is, they escaped Merlin’s cave and
found, instead, this haunted brasserie.
I can’t say why it is so sinister. But sen-
sitives should probably avoid it.
All this is marvellous but I have
eaten worse food only once: at Trump
Tower in New York City incidental-
ly, next to a defibrillator. The steak
is tough. The mushroom spaghetti is
without flavour. The Caesar salad is
inedible. The burger is OK.
Pudding is upsetting. My husband
orders lemon posset with the consist-
ency of Plasticine. His spoon can stand
up in it, like the sword in the stone. I
order a Victoria sponge cake with a
photograph of the White House on it.
I get the exterior of the Lincoln bed-
room. The paper tastes slightly better
than the sponge but food is not the
point here.
Mappin enters. He is brokenly
handsome and my normally placid
dog barks at him. He starts a conversa-
tion on his mobile with the speaker on,
with someone who either is, or is pre-
tending to be, in Santorini; and unwrit-
ten novels spill out of him.
I wouldn’t suggest you eat here, but
I doubt there is a better place to drop
acid in the west. It is nothing like Soho
House on sea, which would be its fate
if mad hoteliers didn’t lurk here paint-
ing motorcars, and that is somehow
wondrous.Camelot Castle Hotel, Castle View,
Tintagel, PL34 0DQ, tel: 01840 770202.Food
The castle of weirdness
Tanya Gold
Pudding is
ups et t i n g.
My husband
orders lemon
posset with the
consistency of
PlasticineIt was most unlooked-for that
a king should ally with Whig
politicians to seek parliamentary
reform, but that was what William
IV did when Earl Grey was trying
to carry the Great Reform Bill in- When Grey apologised for
putting him in a hurry, the Sailor
King exclaimed: ‘Never mind that.
I am always at single anchor.’
Parliament was bedlam, Peel
seemed ‘about to fall into a fit’,
the Speaker had ‘a face equally
red and quivering with rage’.
The Lords had tabled a motion
to stop the King dissolving
parliament. To head them off
from infringing his prerogative,
William decided to prorogue
it in person. When told by the
Master of the Horse that the
state coachman was absent,
William cried: ‘Then I will go in
a hackney coach.’
I had seen that quotation given
with hackney cab for hackney
coach, and I wondered if it was
an early use of cab. The first
citation in the Oxford English
Dictionary is from the next year,- He could certainly not have
said, like Eliza Doolittle in 1914,
‘Not bloody likely. I am going in a
taxi.’ Although electric-powered
cabs were introduced to London
in 1897 (switching exhausted
batteries for recharged ones in
two or three minutes), the name
taxi or taxi-cab, taken from the
meter, did not arrive until 1907.
Anyway, the story about William
IV and the hackney coach was
given by John Cam Hobhouse
(Lord Broughton), who was there
on the day.
My friendly and learned
neighbour in the interior of
this magazine, Dr Peter Jones,
tells me that the Latin prorogo
does not mean ‘suspend’ but
‘postpone’. Seneca talks of
mala inevitabilia aut quae minuipossunt aut qua prorogari,
‘those unavoidable evils which
can be lessened or postponed’.
All parliaments are prorogued
or dissolved sooner or later,
but these necessary evils are
eventually opened once more.
Parliament is not opened by
any formula of words, merely
by the monarch summoning
the Commons to the Lords.
The Queen ends her speech:
‘My Lords and Members of the
House of Commons, I pray that
the blessing of Almighty God
may rest upon your counsels,’
but, even if she didn’t, the new
session would have begun.
— Dot Wordsworthmind your language
Prorogue‘I used to be a Tory whip so I’m used to this kind of thing.’
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