112 Esquire — June 2018
opportunist, riding on the coatails of history”.
Of course, Farage was way too cool to rise to
this, and simply donated his habitual shit-
eating grin to the camera, but it remains one of
my finest put-downs; why, I’d stubbed the man
out as if he were one of the filter-tips he him-
self perennially pufs upon.
Yes! As my taxi caromed along the lanes,
and swung in through the gates of Cliveden,
I saw a Churchillian future ahead of me, one
in which such bon mots fell as casually from
my lips as cigaretes had once been raised to
them. he Farage stubbing-out had been a sort
of sympathetic magic, a symbolic act presaging
the final extinguishing of the real thing.
And as my rehab companion and I entered
the Grand Hall, to be welcomed by a beaming
and burly chap called Michael Chaloner, who
would be our Virgil throughout our stay in
the underworld of the über-rich, it struck me
that it was already rising 15 hours since I’d last
ingested any nicotine, and that I felt perfectly all
right: a litle nervy, granted, and rather emotion-
ally... labile — but I’d by no means turned into
the slavering homicidal maniac I’d anticipated.
Was this, I wondered, because I was look-
ing forward to taking up residence in the
Shrewsbury Suite? A set of rooms on the first
floor of the west wing that are so elegantly
appointed, with such magnificent views out
over the surrounding country, that — get this
— they have their own guestbook. Actually,
I wouldn’t be surprised if every single toilet at
Cliveden had its own guestbook because this is
an establishment that’s constantly being memo-
rialised. Hell, since it’s actually owned by the
National Trust, it’s already a public monument
of sorts. Siting in the woody vastness of the
library, either sipping our cocktails or our tea,
my companion and I would stare out over the
truly massive parterre, and see there the ghastly
hoi polloi, clad in brightly coloured garments of
nylon and Gore-Tex, draging their equally vile
offspring between the neatly clipped hedges.
(For those of you too lower class to know what
a parterre is, I have no wise, defining words —
only a soupçon of piy.)
Bags deposited by the four-poster in the
Shrewsbury Suite, we adjourned first to the Astor
Grill for a litle light luncheon, and then to the
spa, where my companion received some sort of
mysterious “treatment”, while I availed myself
of first the sauna, and then the steam room,
intent on sweating out the last fugitive mol-
ecules of nicotinic acid. The grill room was
fairly sparsely tenanted, the spa still emptier.
As I dripped, I found it hard not to think of the
scene in hunderball, in which Sean Connery's
James Bond is lashed to a stretching machine
at a health farm by an agent of Spectre who’s
coincidentally taking a cure. Bond is almost
torn in two by the errant gym equipment, but
then that’s what you get if you waste taxpay-
ers’ money on such an establishment. If Bond
had addressed his issues at Cliveden instead,
he’d have avoided all assassination attempts,
although he’d probably have found it diicult to
resist the extravagantly dry Martinis.i’ve written in these pages before about my
positive aversion to luxury. Not, you appreciate,
that I don’t like Egyptian coton sheets, haute
cuisine and impeccably mannered service as
much as the next spoilt dick, but just because
luxury, no mater how opulent, is never in my
experience luxurious enough: there’s always
some dry litle pea lodged deep inside the mat-
tress, that nonetheless renders this litle prin-
cess black and blue by morning. Perhaps it
was because my trip to Cliveden was so goal-
oriented that I didn’t experience the pea efect;
this meant I compared the establishment not
with the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles or the
Hotel Arts in Barcelona, but with Broadway
Lodge in Weston-super-Mare.
As I’ve already remarked, I’ve done conven-
tional rehab and from the luxury point of view
it sucks dog shit, what with its tough love, and
having to grout the splashback in the shower
stall before you can take a shower. It sucks
from the service angle as well, what with all
that rigorous honesy; I was fed up with people
telling me I was a self-deceiving liar. Instead,
I wanted to bask in my self-deception, while
people were paid to say how very nice it was
to see me, their manner strongly implying that
I was one of the most estimable fellows ever
to be born.
This is the sort of feedback the staff at
Cliveden positively excel at and we were borneon a pink cloud of approbation from spa to suite,
to the library for cocktails, and finally to the
beautifully appointed André Garret Restaurant
for dinner. I’m not going to itemise all the
yummy dishes we ate anymore than I’m going
to exhaustively describe the decor — that’s what
websites are for. What I can tell you, is that the
food was of such piquancy, and the service of
such subtle obsequiousness, that when the long
meal ended — let alone before — I didn’t feel the
slightest need of my habitual, smoy digestif.
Yes, yes, I appreciate that providing
Cliveden-syle rehab for all of Britain’s smok-
ers, drinkers, dragon-chasers and crackheads
would place a considerable burden on the tax-
payer but I ask you, aren’t the costs of our nox-
ious addictions already begaring the nation?
Besides, I was able to kick La Divina Nicotina
into touch with a mere two nights at Cliveden,
whereas the minimum stay in primary care at
the likes of he Priory takes six to eight weeks
and costs north of 20 grand!If James Bond had addressed his health
issues at Cliveden, he’d have avoided
all assassination attempts, although he’d
probably have found it difficult to resist
the extravagantly dry Martinis