Independent On Sunday: Super-rich vie for £100,000 butlers trained by the Palace.
The art of “butling” is enjoying an unprecedented renaissance. Not since the days of the landed gentry have butlers been such hot property, providing the ultimate bling in the Beckham household as well as offering media-shy dotcom millionaires and Russian oligarchs that extra bit of personal service.
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An assortment of wealthy private-equity executives, hedge-fund dealers, entrepreneurs and celebrities, with personal fortunes to match their desire for the ultimate personal assistant, are fuelling the trend.
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A butler has to anticipate his master’s every whim. The American rapper Sean “Puffy” Coombs would make his butler, Farnsworth Bentley, follow him around during hot spells with a parasol to shade him. One whim Farnsworth failed to predict saw him having to jump straight back on a plane to New York from the Côte d’Azur after failing to pack the rap star’s favourite ties.
bjacques
October 1, 2007 at 1:15 pmFunnily enough, I saw “Remains of the Day” on Belgian TV a few nights ago. Today’s crop of “gentlemen” needing gentlemen make the old fascist lord James Fox seem almost sympathetic (which he sort of was; he was ruined by his sense of honor, as was Anthony Hopkins).
“Sean Jean” = Harry Enfield the broken-down rock star in “Celeb”
Palau
October 2, 2007 at 5:06 amOddly enough I found myself thinking idly the other day, in a tea and biscuit-fuelled nostalgic Trollopian haze, about the difference between rule by yer actual landed aristocracy with many generations’ worth of privilege behind them, and rule by the modern corporate aristocracy – and wondering whether there wasn’t something to be said for a political system in which the decision-makers were so far removed from immediate financial concerns that economic self-interest was not their motivating force. I’d got myself so far down that road I was nearly ready to shout ‘Come back Lord Melbourne, all is forgiven!’
Then I looked at George Osbourne’s pudgy, weak-chinned, greedy face at the Tory conference and had a sudden attack of the Thackerays.
Palau
October 2, 2007 at 5:09 amRe ‘Remains’ Of The Day, it was the last decent novel to win the Booker Prize, IMO, and it’s one of my favourite film adaptations too.