\u2022 Lady Victoria Hervey: Trump friend and Prince Andrew apologist<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n As it\u2019s a rainy, unsocial weekend, he\u2019s dressed for the slouch sofa: a purple embroidered \u201cvintage\u201d cowboy shirt (\u201cVintage Topman, that is\u201d) and baggy Primark pants, his sartorial style now several years into its East European proletarian on Oxford Street period. These days it\u2019s either plain Primark duds (he likes the bargain-priced apparel behemoth\u2019s anonymity and simplicity \u2014 \u201cAnd so well made!\u201d) or the easy athleisure of Sports Direct tracksuits and logo\u2019d hoodies. I call him \u201cNicky Adidaslam\u201d, which he seems to like. He won\u2019t be doing \u201cfestive\u201d dressing.<\/p>\n Like the Regent Street lights celebrity switch-on, the premiere of the John Lewis telly ad, mince pies appearing prematurely on supermarket shelves and the first ice rinks in the shopping malls, the unfurling of Nicky\u2019s tea towel has become something of a Christmas diary moment. It\u2019s the interior designer\u2019s very own Christmas Dishonours list and he sees it in the grand tradition of other highfalutin seasonal markers such as the BBC\u2019s Reith Lectures. Or John Julius Norwich\u2019s annual \u201ccommonplace\u201d miscellany, which the writer and historian would give to his friends every year during the Sixties and beyond. \u201cJohn Julius Norwich being the son of Diana Cooper, Viscountess Norwich,\u201d Nicky adds helpfully.<\/p>\n With Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall at the time, in 2021. \u201cThe royal family need to be grander\u201d<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n This time around, the tea towel is full of jarring, overused phrases \u2014 \u201cWhat\u2019s not to like?\u201d; \u201cI\u2019m a hugger\u201d \u2014 that have grinched his draining board. Elsewhere there is some genteel middle-class baiting material in the form of \u201cKilner jars\u201d, \u201cclapping the chef\u201d and \u201csunblock\u201d. Other targets seem to be more personal: Stephen Fry (\u201cA royal suck-up. No need to drill for oil in Scotland when you have Stephen Fry\u201d), Dan Snow and \u201cAnne McElvoy\u2019s opinions\u201d. (The senior editor at The Economist is said to be delighted at her inclusion.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s not all Nicky\u2019s own work; his wicked pal Rupert Everett contributed \u201cdeath threats\u201d and last year Jeremy Clarkson<\/a> offered the poor man\u2019s dilemma of \u201cneeding house keys\u201d. The royal family, with the exception of Camilla<\/a>, are in danger of being common too. \u201cToo parochial. They need to be grander,\u201d He thinks Meghan Markle<\/a> is wonderful. He fan-girls for Melania Trump<\/a> and Victoria Beckham<\/a>.<\/p>\n With the deliciously contrary tea towels established as a significant revenue stream (on the Selfridges website you can find a whole \u201carchive\u201d of Nicky tea towels available), how will he be spending his Christmas<\/a>?<\/p>\n With Ringo Starr, for whom he designed a home, in 2014<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n Haslam and Lady Victoria Hervey in 2001<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n \u201cAlone. Asleep. Doing nothing,\u201d he says. \u201cWonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n Modern Christmas Days, Nicky says, being ever so common. \u201cI hate saying \u2018Happy Christmas\u2019 to everyone. I can\u2019t bear to sit down to a lunch that lasts from midday to 8pm and is far too much food anyway.<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem is because people are out of town for most of it. In London everyone used to stay around for Christmas and new year and there would be great parties all over town during that period. Even on Christmas Day itself. Now, because everyone is skiing or in the Caribbean, there\u2019s no sense of celebration. One\u2019s friends just aren\u2019t around and that ruins the whole point of present-giving.\u201d (Which happens on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, \u201cobviously\u201d. Presents, if given, must be wrapped meticulously \u201cwith silk or velvet ribbon\u201d.)<\/p>\n Ergo, there will be no decorations chez Haslam. \u201cAlthough I do like a fake tree.\u201d<\/p>\n For the rest of us? He stipulates garlands of hand-harvested ivy, draped across picture frames, mantelpiece, windowsills etc.<\/p>\n Not holly. \u201cThe red berries are too showy. I always picked them off. You don\u2019t need colour at Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n White lights? \u201cNot flashing either.\u201d<\/p>\n Baubles? \u201cOn trees only. And they must come from Russia \u2014 the Russians make the best Christmas decorations.\u201d<\/p>\n Haslam in Central Park, New York, in 1978\u2026<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n \u2026 and with Andy Warhol at Regine\u2019s nightclub two years later<\/p>\n REX<\/p>\n Being theologically correct is essential also \u2014 it is v common to make an incorrect allusion to the \u201cimmaculate conception\u201d. \u201cI am very moved by the Christmas story and idea of Mary being \u2018immaculate\u2019,\u201d Nicky says. \u201cIt\u2019s not about the birth of Jesus. It actually refers to the conception of Mary in the womb of her own mother, St Anne. Mary was born \u2018immaculate\u2019, as a perfect person, so she could give birth to Jesus. Diana Cooper told me that.\u201d<\/p>\n If he\u2019s going to pray on Christmas morning, Nicky will be opting for a Catholic service in a South Kensington \u201chigh\u201d church. He loves liturgy, sacraments, priestly authority, the whole \u201cbells and smells\u201d thing. Does he sing hymns? Only the grim ones and the joyous, soaring ones.<\/p>\n So Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and In the Bleak Midwinter. \u201cCan\u2019t bear God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, which sounds like something you might sing in a pub.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Nicky croons like nobody else has for decades\u2019<\/p>\n Actually, Nicky is more a crooner than a chorister. He has a new album coming out and, in the grand tradition of Cliff Richard and Slade, has his sights now on the Christmas No 1 in the hit parade as well as the top slot in the tea towel charts.<\/p>\n Bryan Ferry and Nicky Haslam, London, 2014<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n His last record, Midnight Matinee, released in 2013 and produced by his pal David Ogilvy, was a dream dinner party of an album featuring songs with Bryan Ferry, Bob Geldof, Helena Bonham Carter (her first \u2014 and very possibly last \u2014 musical venture), Tracey Emin and Cilla Black.<\/p>\n \u2022 John Lewis wants me to be an old \u2018rave dad\u2019 this Christmas. No, thanks<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n The new one is solo Nicky: stripped back, simple and heartfelt \u2014 piano, violin and voice \u2014 songs and show tunes by Kurt Weill, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter. Intimate, elegiac, elegantly phrased and hitting the high Cs when needed (\u201cVery few people can, you know\u201d), it is the music of a man who grew up \u2014 in style \u2014 in America and England during the Fifties, whose mother, Diamond Ponsonby, wore Dior couture (and had Queen Victoria as a godmother). Who listened to US imports of original soundtracks \u2014 recordings on shellac long players brought back from the US by his diplomat father, a man who would change into a dinner jacket every night on his return home from the office. You may well have a little weep listening to Nicky sing I Got Lost in His Arms from Annie Get Your Gun. I know I did.<\/p>\n This is no vanity project. Recently Nicky played the raw cabaret-performance recordings to his Cotswolds neighbour Michael Haas, a Grammy-winning record producer, author and classical musician who studied piano at the Conservatory in Vienna. Haas called the collection \u201ca work of genius\u201d, urging the singer to mix and produce the album professionally. Nicky \u201ccroons in the old-fashioned sense. Like nobody else has for decades,\u201d Haas says.<\/p>\n \u2018I try very much not to be No\u00ebl Coward\u2019<\/p>\n Robbie Williams\u2019 songwriter and producer Guy Chambers (a fan and collaborator) gave up his west London studio for the mixing and Nicky\u2019s boogie-woogie friend Jools Holland provided approval. \u201cNicky delivers a song with is own uniquely English flavour,\u201d Holland says. \u201cHis singing exudes the charm of No\u00ebl Coward and the glamour of Rex Harrison.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cActually, I try very much not to be No\u00ebl Coward,\u201d Nicky says. \u201cI prefer the slushy sound of Vic Damone. Much better than Frank Sinatra.\u201d Who would bet against his rendition of Cole Porter\u2019s Make It Another Old Fashioned, Please taking over from the Pogues\u2019 Fairytale of New York as the nation\u2019s favourite yuletide drinking song?<\/p>\n With Queen Elizabeth II in 2012<\/p>\n SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n Nicky Haslam has been around popular music since popular music began. \u201cI saw it coming in for the first time. Girls screaming at Johnnie Ray. The voices of Edd Byrnes, Bobby Short, Fabian and Sam Cooke. Divine singers.\u201d He vividly remembers the first time he heard Bobby Vinton singing Blue Velvet \u2014 blaring from the car radio of a borrowed Rolls-Royce soft top while cruising down Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, \u201con my way to a really wonderful leather bar\u201d.<\/p>\n At home, his ballerina aunt taught him the foxtrot and the cha-cha-cha. He learnt the Madison and the Watusi in nightclubs. At Eton, he heard Bill Haley & his Comets and was shown how to twist by the girls from Chubby Checker\u2019s band. Later, Nicky would pass on the hip-shaking moves to Brigitte Bardot on a sandy-floored bo\u00eete in St Tropez.<\/p>\n Haslam introduced Mick Jagger to America<\/p>\n After leaving school he worked for the photographer John French and met his young assistant David Bailey. Bailey introduced Nicky to Mick Jagger<\/a>; Nicky, following Bailey and his girlfriend Jean Shrimpton to New York, introduced Jagger to America.<\/p>\n \u201cAs well as being in the band, Mick was working for [Jean\u2019s sister] Chrissie Shrimpton as her cleaner,\u201d he recalls. (Mick Jagger \u2014 housemaid!) \u201cThe Stones had already toured America once but had been a complete flop. When they came back six months later in 1964, [Warhol superstar] \u2018Baby\u2019 Jane Holzer and I threw a party for them at photographer Jerry Schatzberg\u2019s studio on East 25th Street. All the papers picked up the story and Tom Wolfe wrote an Esquire story about it called Girl of the Year. [The essay was later published in Wolfe\u2019s nonfiction compendium, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.]<\/p>\n At the Evening Standard Film Awards with Mick Jagger, 2002. \u201cMick is so\u2026 quixotic. Keith is the loveliest Rolling Stone\u201d<\/p>\n SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n \u201cThe Stones were everywhere after that,\u201d he says. But only gentleman drummer Charlie Watts was kind enough to remember it and acknowledge the favour, writing, \u201cThanks, Nicky,\u201d in his autobiography. Six decades on, he is still friends with Jagger. \u201cBut it can be difficult. Mick is so\u2026 quixotic. Keith is the loveliest Rolling Stone.\u201d<\/p>\n In America, Haslam became known as an art director, magazine editor, scenester and trend setter. He introduced Yves Saint Laurent (\u201cA boy I had met in Paris\u201d) to fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Vreeland called Nicky \u201cRembrandt\u201d and once threw a party to celebrate his new suede suit, later commissioning her young British art director to travel back to England to photograph a promising group called the Beatles.<\/p>\n \u201cWe went up to Northampton to see them. Girls were throwing flowers at them. I picked them all up off the floor and handed them back to the boys. I made them carry them like Victorian posies. The picture was published in Vogue. It was the first time anyone in America had seen what they looked like.\u201d Nicky would keep in touch with Paul McCartney<\/a> during his romance with Jane Asher \u2014 \u201cwho is my cousin\u201d, he says, acknowledging that pretty much all posh people are related to one another in some way. \u201cJane Asher is a Ponsonby.\u201d (And, it turns out, also a descendent of King James I.)<\/p>\n \u2018I don\u2019t like sex\u2019<\/p>\n Turning to interior design, Nicky created homes for Sir Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry in England and, in America, for Ringo Starr, his transatlantic social life now moving to a heady 4\/4 backbeat. In high and low places.<\/p>\n He was Elizabeth Taylor\u2019s red carpet date for the London premiere of Cleopatra in 1963. He appeared in Andy Warhol\u2019s Soap Opera and started to enjoy the company of other young men. \u201cThe first man to ever pick me up was Hugh Paddick [who played Julian to Kenneth Williams\u2019 Sandy in the BBC radio show Round the Horne]. Being homosexual was so much more fun when it was illegal.\u201d It wasn\u2019t about sex. \u201cI don\u2019t like sex,\u201d he says. \u201cI am attracted to boys but I don\u2019t need to touch them.\u201d As he partied with politicians, royalty and rock stars, Antony Armstrong-Jones \u2014 later Lord Snowdon and husband to Princess Margaret \u2014 was another famous Nicky conquest.<\/p>\n In his London home<\/p>\n TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE<\/p>\n Did he meet any US presidents? He pauses and counts on his fingers. So far, he\u2019s encountered seven: Truman, Nixon, JFK, Johnson, Bush Sr and Bush Jr. \u201cDonald Trump<\/a> had a party at Claridge\u2019s one year, just after he\u2019d married Marla Maples [in 1993]. He was still a ridiculous joke back then, but she was ravishing.\u201d In the Eighties, while Trump was still married to his first wife, Ivana, Nicky attended a dinner for the Queen Mother, given by Maureen Constance Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (n\u00e9e Guinness). The future president\u2019s wife was placed next to the disgraced Tory MP John Profumo, who promptly made a crude pass at her. \u201cHave you ever been f***ed by a 70-year-old? You should try it. It\u2019s fun.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, Jeffrey Epstein too. Many times. \u201cI met Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell. I went to one of those parties at her father\u2019s terrible house in Oxfordshire [Headington Hill Hall].\u201d Epstein was \u201cvery attractive and great fun. Tarty and camp.\u201d<\/p>\n I take a sharp intake of the room\u2019s hot smoky air as he relays some more scurrilous detail about Epstein, Trump, Trump\u2019s lawyer Roy Cohn and a famous interior designer. There are more Co-op cocktails, more cigarettes. Lots more rattly laughs. In this pretty Oxfordshire grotto, I am an innocent at Bad Santa\u2019s knee, listening to stories of decadence, hilarity and celebrity that link aristocrats, criminals, musicians, designers, oligarchs and plutocrats. Nicky Haslam their immaculate connection. <\/p>\n Nicky Haslam\u2019s tea towels are on sale at <\/b>selfridges.com<\/b><\/a> and <\/b>nickyhaslamstudio.com<\/b><\/a>. His new album, <\/b>One Night (Live at the Pheasantry, London)<\/b>, is available to stream on <\/b>Spotify<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nicholas Ponsonby Haslam, aged 86, is making himself laugh. Great fag-smoker\u2019s guffaws and rattly-cough chuckles as he lights…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[5105,7710,519,448],"class_list":{"0":"post-594350","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-royal","9":"tag-royal-families","10":"tag-royal-family","11":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115614372398595376","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/35a0794c-33b4-402c-a389-8e65afbb7695.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/451fb8ca-e868-43d1-baee-0e24568b5e64.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"Champagne](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/bbbd6d07-851e-4d57-b387-a4dde2bc5a7d.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Launch](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/e42111d2-389a-4e10-b930-cfea1e224124.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n