Harriet Harman and Ségolène Royal: sisters under the skin

Harriet Harman's political style, if nothing else, recalls the bossiness of French socialist Ségolène Royal.

Ségolène Royal: a firm believer that the state knows best Photo: Reuters

What is it with Socialist women politicians and their seemingly uncontrollable urge to give feminism a bad name? As part of the improbable duo left in charge during Gordon Brown’s Scottish staycation, Harriet Harman managed the feat of making Lord Mandelson seem like a safe pair of hands. Between criticising men (“they can’t be left running things on their own”) and turf-brawling with Jack Straw’s mandarins over the announcement of new measures for rape victims, Miss Harman certainly made a lasting impression.

Love her or hate her, you can’t ignore her. In fact, that seems to be the plan – to make herself so omnipresent, whether out of genuine conviction or tactical positioning, that her ascension to the leadership becomes inevitable.

Yet one Continental example should serve as a warning. Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist, rammed her candidacy for the presidency through her party’s primaries with exactly the same combination of ostentatious feminism and obsessive self-promotion. Whenever she was rebuked for one of her numerous gaffes (from praising the “speed” of the Chinese law courts, to being hoaxed by a comedian into supporting Québecois and Corsican independence, to getting the number of French nuclear submarines wrong), Royal blamed the attitude of men – whether her adversary, Nicolas Sarkozy, or her own party grandees – faced with a female candidate.

Soon, any question she didn’t wish to answer was brushed aside angrily on feminist grounds. “You wouldn’t dare pose such a question to a man,” she spat at a bemused New York Times reporter who asked her to outline her foreign policy.

Like Harman, Ségolène comes from a privileged background. The daughter of a career officer, she was educated in select Catholic schools. Again like Harman, her accent combines the populist vowels more often heard from shop stewards with the preachy – occasionally downright messianic – overtones of the Sunday sermon. She attended ENA, the elite government school that has produced eight of France’s last 15 prime ministers, two of six presidents, almost half the cabinet and almost the entirety of the civil service elite.

ENA does produce competent people, but they are often accused, with good reason, of being detached from everyday reality. Few “énarques” have any experience of the private sector; far fewer are entrepreneurs. They have abstract notions of what it means to meet a payroll, and are great believers in social engineering and that the state knows best. Sound familiar?

Of course, Ségolène differs from her British counterpart in one crucial aspect – although blessed with a good figure and a lovely oval face, there has been much speculation that she underwent radical cosmetic surgery to firm up her jaw, accentuate her cheekbones and give her a radiant smile. (She has never commented, but comparing the cover of an early autobiography raises certain questions.)

The British don’t object to their women politicians looking more schoolmarmish than glamorous, and they might mistrust the kind of unmarried glamourpuss who, after a hard-fought campaign, kicks out the father of her four children, and gets chased by the paparazzi during the holidays she spends with her new beau. Over the Channel, it’s a non-issue. Even among French feminists, some attention is paid to looks and to fashion.

On the other hand, Ségolène, like Harriet, has few women friends and supporters. Her colleagues find her arrogant and unpredictable: her feminism is on her terms only. More reticent (and competent) female politicians are known to complain in private that Ségolène’s grandstanding sets back women’s political advances. “She fabricates issues where progress had already been achieved,” Michèle Alliot-Marie, one of the Sarkozy government mainstays, has complained.

But as both Harriet and Ségolène might tell you, when you’re a self-proclaimed champion of women everywhere, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Sex, Nazis, and Videotape

The inestimable entertainment of the Max Mosley scandal.

London It's the cup of tea that lifts the Max Mosley sex scandal from the tawdry to the Roald Dahl-esque. "F1 boss Max Mosley has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers--Son of fascist Hitler lover in sex shame" blared the cover of the London News of the World tabloid, complete with a seven-page spread and a 90-second video--shot by a camera concealed in one of the girls' bra--on its website, the salient parts tactfully covered with a checkered racing flag. Unlike Eliot Spitzer's pedestrian misdeeds, where the most shocking part was the girl's inflated price tag, this one has everything. Whips, chains, Nazi uniforms, role-playing, five hookers in a Chelsea basement "dungeon" (at bargain basement prices, too; the total tab was a little under $5,000), and YouTube footage of the hanky-panky. And, in unique British style, after the floggings, spankings, German-language play-acting, and various activities, Mosley, who'd acted out both victim and guard, concluded his fantasy afternoon with the girls by sharing a cup of tea before shrugging himself back into his business suit--both the whipping bench and the restorative cuppa belong to the specific repertoire of the English sexual psyche. What gave the whole story its unique, er, twist, is Mosley's background. He is the son of Britain's most notorious Fascist couple: Sir Oswald Mosley and his second wife, Diana. Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 after an inspirational visit chez Mussolini, and became famous as a rabble-rousing orator and troublemaker, marching into the working-class East End Jewish neighborhoods with black-shirted, goose-stepping troops equipped with knuckle-dusters and truncheons. A serial womanizer, the married Mosley had seduced the 22-year-old society beauty Diana Guinness, who left her brewery heir husband and two young sons to live openly as Mosley's mistress. Diana belonged to the glittering brood of aristocratic Bright Young Things, the six Mitford sisters, who together would span the entire spectrum of ideologies of the 20th century, from the Communist Jessica (who ran away from home to the Spanish Civil War) to the Nazi Unity (who was befriended by Hitler while in finishing-school at Munich and shot herself when war was declared). Diana sided with Unity and attended with her several Nazi party days at Nuremberg, making friends with assorted Third Reich luminaries, including Hitler, who took her to the Bayreuth festival. Mosley's first wife died of peritonitis, and, in 1936, he married Diana in the Goebbels' drawing room, with Hitler as best man. The Mosleys were interned during World War II--by order of Diana's distant cousin, Winston Churchill. Max, the Mosleys' second son, born 11 weeks prior to his parents' arrest, spent the first three and a half years of his life with nannies and relations. After the war, his parents sent him to school in Ireland, France, and Germany to shield him from the opprobrium his name evoked. It's no wonder that Max, who after Oxford trained to become a lawyer, found the world of car racing liberating when he discovered it in the mid-1960s. "He encountered a world where his name meant nothing. Indeed, fellow entrants in club races assumed he was the son of coach builder Alf Mosley from Leicester," explains the motor racing correspondent Kevin Garside. Mosley was neither a terribly successful driver, not even a first-rank team owner, but he came into his own working with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, the tycoon who now owns the Formula One commercial rights, particularly after he ousted the ageing Jean-Marie Balestre from the leadership of the sport's regulatory body in 1991. (Balestre himself had a colorful past: a former automotive journalist, he made much of his supposed wartime record with the French Resistance until pictures of him in Waffen SS uniform emerged. Somehow he still managed to get himself decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1979.) Mosley and Ecclestone--who is Jewish and a major financial contributor to Tony Blair's New Labour, as is Mosley on a smaller scale--transformed Formula One into the global, multibillion-dollar business it has become today, imposing better safety rules and capping research spending to provide a level playing field. Mosley's abrupt style and limited tolerance for fools served him well in that world of larger-than-life performers, who live (and die) fast. "If Max was in bed with two hookers, they'd say 'good for you' or something like that," Ecclestone said when he learned of the latest affair. "Assuming it's all true, what people do privately is up to them. I don't honestly believe [it] affects the sport in any way. Knowing Max it might be all a bit of a joke. You know, it's one of those things where he's sort of taking the piss, rather than anything against Jewish people." Ecclestone owes to Mosley what may be the most rewarding contract in the history of professional sports: a 100-year Formula One commercial rights exclusive, slated to run from 2010 to 2110, sanctioned by an unprecedented European Commission ruling after Mosley managed to persuade competition commissioner Mario Monti that it wasn't a monopoly. There was no tender, and Ecclestone was the lone bidder for the rights, for which he paid about $300 million. His companies are now valued 20 times that amount. Mosley feels there is no area of the sport he shouldn't concern himself with. Thus, last summer, was the Ferrari/McLaren industrial espionage criminal case, in which 800 pages of Ferrari's designs were stolen and used by McLaren-Mercedes's engineers. A criminal investigation being under way, he had no cause to intervene. Mosley nevertheless decided that the FIA--the International Automobile Association, which Mosley heads--should fine McLaren a record $100 million for "bringing the sport into disrepute." When a similar case arose with Renault (who had hired a design engineer from the McLaren stable who provided numerous engine and chassis diagrams), Mosley declined to fine them at all, contrasting Renault's "immediate contrition" with McLaren's "lies." To no one's great surprise, Mercedes was among the first to call for his resignation when the sex story broke in the News of the World, followed by BMW, then by Toyota and Honda. Mosley, who only denies the Nazi angle of the whole episode (the rest, he says, is his private life), was swift to hit back. "Given the history of BMW and Mercedes Benz, particularly before and during the Second World War, I fully understand why they would wish to strongly distance themselves from what they rightly describe as the disgraceful content of these publications." He was certainly touching on a sensitive point--the Mosley scandal, while virtually ignored by the French press, has been playing in large spreads in German newspapers--but he was also indulging in German-baiting of the "Don't Mention the War" variety. Press coverage in England has been enormous--often driven by humorous headlines and wordplay. "How about a whip-round for Max's retirement?" asked a Daily Telegraph columnist. So far, the Canadian, German, U.S., Dutch, and New Zealand motorists associations have called on him to go. (To date, only the United Arab Emirates motoring association have announced they support him.) Mosley has decided to stick it out to the end of his mandate in 2009 ("Triumph of the Wheel?" suggested the Times), but called an extraordinary FIA general assembly on June 3, at which the full membership--222 national motoring organizations from 130 countries--will take a secret-ballot vote of confidence. But is his position tenable until then? His mother, who lived to the age of 93 in Paris, told interviewers to the end that she had been "terribly, terribly fond" of Hitler, and saw no point in dissembling. She might not have admired her son's tastes, according to her biographer Anne de Courcy, but she would certainly have admired his stubbornness. © Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

'Monica's story' much like Diana's

The most famous feminine icon of our media-obsessed fin-de-siècle is an attractive, egocentric, not-particularly bright, love-addicted young woman from a well-to-do broken home, prone to frequent temper tantrums, with an eating disorder, a questionable taste in men, a serious telephone, shopping and hairdressing habit, and who, just out of her teens, fooled herself into thinking that she would one day become consort to the Master of the World.

No, not Monica Lewinsky. The late Princess Diana, of course.

The announcement, earlier this week, that Diana's approved biographer, Andrew Morton, would write Monica's own story for St. Martin's Press/Michael O'Mara books, should come as no surprise to us.

After all, both women alternately tried to conform, then chafed (rather than rebelled) against bewildering expectations of public and private behavior. They found themselves hounded by the establishment and the media, their telephone calls tapped, their love life speculated upon. Both have followed various courses of psychotherapy and counseling. Vast sums of money have been offered to auction off their clothes. Both rated "Vanity Fair" photoshoots. Both spent claustrophobic months cooped-up in their plush apartments, eating TV dinners in front of the tube, reduced to tears at the prospect of a life forever spent under a magnifying glass.

The similarities go much further than the effects of the celebrity machine steamroller. Both Monica and Diana were painfully ill-equipped to deal with adulthood, their barely-adequate schooling (whether at West Heath College or Bel Air Prep School) offering them little opportunity for self-esteem. After managing a single prize over her entire high-school years (for "best-kept hamster"), Diana was so desperately unhappy in the Swiss finishing school she was subsequently packed off to that she dropped out after one term. Monica was the only girl in her class not invited to her classmate Tori Spelling (daughter of "Dynasty" producer Aaron Spelling)' 15th birthday. Diana's first jobs were as cleaning lady and nanny. Monica's were as shop assistant and legal receptionist.

Both girls have unresolved conflicts with more poised, but less scrupulous mothers, who drilled into them unreasonable expectations, and whom they have regularly, if somewhat wistfully, termed [their] "best friend[s]". Diana's "bolted" (the accepted expression, in the English upper classes) from the family home to pursue an affair with a married man, ultimately losing custody of her children. Marcia Lewis-Lewinsky divorced Monica's father California-style, with a settlement including therapy costs for her daughter. "I was brought up with lies all my life," says Monica in the infamous Tripp tapes. "To get money from my Dad I had to tell him a story. My Mom lied about everything ... all the time."

It was her mother - thin, celebrity-focussed, more successful with men - who got Monica her intern's job at the White House. It was Diana's maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, who eventually pushed her as a suitable bride for Prince Charles; but it was Diana's mother who first encouraged her children to play with the young princes, and used to joke that Diana would marry Prince Andrew. This is the boomers' sense of entitlement gone mad: Windsor Castle or the White House as post-prom playground; as the convenient set for ambitions vicariously vested in their children.

Just as Diana ranted about the courtiers, the "gray men" who tiresomely wanted her to read up on the institutions she carelessly opened, Monica complained about Evelyn Lieberman and other White House staffers who expected of her -- typing skills! correct spelling and grammar! Diana rollerskated down the corridors of Buckingham Palace to the muffled sounds of her Walkman. Monica stalked the East Wing corridors with gifts of pizza and Godiva chocolates. Reproaches of unseemliness were greeted with rolled-up eyes by both girls alike. Even their indiscretions are amazingly similar, down to the expletives. "When I think of all I've done for this f***ing family!" [the House of Windsor] Diana complains to her boyfriend James Gilbey in the notorious "Squidgygate" taped telephone call.

Flareups were frequent: Diana shouted at her secretaries, press assistants, her husband's staff; rang up Camilla Parker-Bowles to tell her she had sent hired killers to her house; dropped her friends dramatically; fired aides, maids, hairdressers, masseuses, therapists. Monica merely screamed at the Secret Service and at the long-suffering Betty Currie. "If I'd know the sort of girl you were, I would never have gotten involved with you," President Clinton is quoted as telling Monica: feelings heartily endorsed by Prince Charles.

Both Diana and Monica have repeatedly described themselves as "insecure" and "vulnerable"; and in both cases, they have been enthusiastically believed when putting forward their cases for public consumption. Diana's stage was the world media, while Monica's, so far, has only been Ken Starr's Grand Jury; but it is interesting to note how well the jurors received her testimony: time and again, evidence of identification and bonding shows through the transcripts. Motherly advice is profferred: ": Monica, none of us in this room are perfect," says one juror at the end of her deposition. "We all fall and we fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is now I get up faster." Diana charmed the historian Paul Johnson and the film producer David Puttnam; Monica has obviously bowled over Larry King, who had repeatedly said on air that "the President did the wrong thing by this young girl."

Andrew Morton, one of the hardened breed of British Royal correspondents, will no doubt find himself in familiar territory when he starts working with Monica. "They clicked very loudly," his publisher Michael O'Mara said last week, describing the first Morton-Lewinsky meeting. "They were making progress on the book before [Morton] even signed." Diana had picked him personally to write the 1992 biography revealing her bulimia and her suicide attempts, and which finally sealed the end of her marriage to Prince Charles. Its serialization in the Murdoch-owned "Sunday Times," raising as it did Britain's Republican sentiments, was seen as high treason by the Windsors. (Diana answered all Morton's questions in a series of tape-recordings in order to be able to deny ever having met him, a cute legalism Clintonites should appreciate.)

There will be talk of midnight binges (Monica, unlike Diana, did not make herself throw up afterwards); of best friends to whom one "babbles." There will be names of heads of State and foreign countries thrown incongruously into a Barbara Cartland recital: Monica accompanying the Defense Secretary to Bosnia and giving her analysis to Clinton late at night; Diana meeting president Sadat of Egypt during her honeynoon and impulsively kissing him.

It should be acknowledged at this stage that both women tried to please according to the rules they were brought up with. Diana, perfectly capable of stalking her men (the married art-dealer Oliver Hoare, who received more than 200 anonymous phone calls traced to her private line; the Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she regularly visited at night in hospital, and whose parents received a surprise visit at their home near Lahore) outwardly cultivated the pure English rose style. Monica, in the Beverly Hills style documented by the late Nicole Simpson and Faye Resnick, "fooled around" at the drop of a beret.

Of the two, Monica got the rawest deal - a $600,000 book contract instead of a $80 million divorce settlement; Monica inflatable dolls instead of Diana Franklin Mint memorial figurines - but it should be said that she was the more sincere of the two. She did love her "Butthead", whom she saw, perhaps accurately, as a lonely, insecure little boy (a description which could easily apply to prince Charles, but which his ex-wife never considered.) Unlike Diana, she never wished to topple the head of State, trying to protect him instead. But with Andrew Morton's canny help, she might fare better in the long run, as long as she avoids playboys and too-fast cars.

© Copyright Chicago Sun-Times & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1998

Raine at the Ritz

Lord and Lady Spencer, the Escoffier Cookery School, and Paris Ritz memories

"Can you be at the Ritz tomorrow morning by 11:30?" a Mr. Klein said out of the blue on the telephone. "Lord and Lady Spencer will be opening the new Ritz cookery school." "Tomorrow?" I said. "Tomorrow. Earl Spencer, you know, the Princess of Wales's father. And Lady Spencer, uh..." "...is her stepmother. Barbara Cartland's daughter," I said. "Yes, we-ell, yes. Well, can you make it?" I said this was jolly short notice, and I might be ten minutes late, due to a prior appointment at the other end of Paris. "Oh, that's quite all right," Mr Klein (who later turned out to be the Paris Ritz's president, no less) said. "Actually, we're expecting Lord and Lady Spencer at noon, but you know how it is, we want the press to be there before them."

I then knew exactly how it was: we - half a dozen hacks and twice as many photographers - were going to get the closest to a Royalty walkabout as could possibly be contrived. Be there before them. Don't leave before they go. Dutifully smile at their jokes. Don't touch. Look, but don't stare. Jot down every utterance, however inane. And, puh-leeeze, give a good plug to the new Ritz-Escoffier cookery school, ready from April 5 to take on Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne in the highly competitive market of expensive Paris-based top class cookery schools (one week spent in the basement of the Ritz under neon lights, learning to knead pate brisee, starts at £450; the full 12-week course costs £5650,) whose attendance is roughly equally divided between English society debs (there is life after spag. bol.) and serious aspirant two-rosette chefs from all over the world (there is life after kiwi fruit.) In fact, the man in charge of the Ecole De Gastronomie Francaise Ritz-Escoffier, an inexpressibly chic American with a Mid-Atlantic accent called Gregory Usher, was poached by Mr Klein from La Varenne, which he manages to praise while letting it be known that the Ritz-Escoffier will be a lot "more inventive."

The following morning found us dutifully assembled in the immaculate Ritz basement kitchens - a far cry, indeed, from George Orwell's horrendous, squalid descriptions of the neighbouring Hotel Lotti's, circa 1928, in Down and Out in Paris and London. The New York Times was there, and the Sunday Times, and the Telegraph, and ELLE, and Le Figaro Madame. The white-hatted Ritz chef Guy Legay, one of the three French chefs to be awarded the Legion d'Honneur (the other two are Paul Bocuse and Jean Troisgros) was handing out his card to everyone in sight, and promising us he would explain the recipes again afterwards. It was all very cosy, due to the absence of students, who were not expected to start courses until about a month later. Gregory Usher looked charming. Mr Klein looked worried. And then, at 12:00 on the dot, They appeared.

As always when you meets celebrities whose pictures you've seen everywhere, you had to adjust for a fraction of a second to what they really look like. Raine, Countess Spencer, for instance, is much taller than you'd expect - almost as tall as her husband, whom she calls John (not Johnny.) This, coupled with the fact that Princess Di's dad is a quiet sort of unassuming chap, with a friendly manner and unsure smile (not unlike his youngest daughter's in the days when she tried to avoid the press outside her Coleherne Court flat,) certainly contributed to the instantaneous effect she gave - of being totally and immediately in charge.

Clad in an impeccably cut blue dress and a few good jewels (canary yellow diamond ring, diamond bracelet, huge pearl choker, pearl and diamond brooch, all in definite need of cleaning) Raine swept into the gleaming white-tiled kitchen, her husband meekly following three paces behind. (Well, perhaps two paces. Behind.) She exhibited definitely royal graciousness, underscored with Princess Michael-like aplomb. How perfectly lovely, she said, and how extraordinary that in forty years that she'd been coming to the Ritz, she'd never been down to the kitchens before. The two assistant chefs who were about to demonstrate how to cook a Tarte Tatin and a Mussel Soup were duly introduced. "Je ne sais absolument pas faire la cuisine," Raine said in excellent French, translating for our benefit "I really can't boil an egg", then switched back to French, never missing a beat. "Mon mari adore le Ris de Veau, vous savez. Nous venons ici depuis toujours." The Ritz people were impressed. We were impressed.

"Your wife speaks excellent French," I told Lord Spencer, who had pottered away from the group, unnoticed. "She does, doesn't she?" he said with obvious pride, beaming at her. "D'you know, she speaks Japanese too." Japanese? "With all those tourists coming to Althorp, our house I mean. She learnt Japanese and now they're tremendously chuffed when she starts speaking. Fluent Japanese, d'you know." Did he speak Japanese? Oh no, he said, he wasn't clever like his wife. But French, perhaps? Lord Spencer demurred. "Pas devant la famille", he said somewhat puzzlingly with an atrocious accent, making his point.

In the background, the two Ritz cooks had started preparing the mussel soup with swift, competent moves, chopping shallots and heating butter and mincing vegetables and in general being very, very efficient, without anyone paying much attention. The mussels disappeared into a pan, reappeared, got shelled and chopped so fast that I'd defy a competent cook to see how it got done, let alone our little platoon. (Guy Leguay said yes, the cooks would take more time during an actual class.) Within minutes, a small round pan containing an appetizing, sophisticated saffron-yellow steaming mixture was presented to Lord and Lady Spencer, who got at it with large spoons and obligingly posed for the photographers, the full spoons poised in mid-air. Then Raine spoon-fed Lord Spencer, twice (one of the photographers had missed his shot the first time round.) Excellent, they pronounced. Wonderful, very good, first class, absolutely marvellous. The two young cooks then started on the Tatin, ignored by the group - it was now time for the requisite bit of chitchat with Lady Spencer.

"When, uh, when was the first time you came to the Ritz ever," I asked. "Oh, it's such a long time ago," she said a bit vaguely. "Years and years and years. Such a lovely place." I was about to tell her her husband had just told me of his first stay here on Place Vendome, in 1947, aged 22, on his way to ski-ing in Meribel (he'd remembered how his telephone call to his family had been "a big thing, had to book it hours in advance, in those days") then checked myself. Raine Spencer had first stopped at the Ritz when she was still married to the Earl of Dartmouth, while her adoring husband was taking his first wife, Frances Fermoy, now Mrs Shand Kydd, to that same gilded, grand palace of a place. The Paris Ritz, one of the world's truly magical places, had started as separate memories for them - before their messy divorces, before their marriage.

So instead I lamely asked about her knowledge of Japanese. "There are already a lot of Japanese tourists coming to the UK, and we must attract some more," Raine said forcefully, her manner switching in a flash from Royal to New Tory - she reeled off so many figures she could have been Mrs Thatcher on the campaign trail. "The largest group is the Americans, two and a half million. Then the French, 897,000; then the Germans. I was in Berlin recently for the World Tourism Fair, you know." She is, she explained, a member of the British Tourism Authority, has been for years, long before she opened Althorp to the public. "I already was very active when I was married to my first husband." She was recently a judge in a Bed-and-Breakfast competition ("We British must stick to what we're best at, but excel at it") and another tourism design competition. What was she like as a judge? "Oh, I suspect I'm rather bossy," she said with a smile. "But it's worth its while - you feel you're doing something effective."

In past years, Raine Spencer has often been cast in an unfavourable light - her flogging off XVIIth century paintings to refurbish Althorp earned her a lot of flak, as did the tabloids' easy picture of her as the Princess of Wales's wicked stepmother, not to mention the high visibility of her best-selling authoress mother. But with our little flock of journalists, including the notoriously hard-bitten French photographers, she came out with flying colours. "Elle est très sympathique, cette Lady," the tall burly paparazzo from the Gamma picture agency, with his 35lbs of expensive Japanese hardware dangling from his soulders and neck, said between clicks.

Under the eyes of an agitated Mr Klein, I sidled up to her during a brief lull in the baking of the Tarte Tatin. Would she and her husband perhaps agree to a portrait picture upstairs, in the great Ritz hallway? "Of course," she said. We waited for the Spencers for a good while, slightly worried that once the function had been performed, they might have vanished to enjoy their holiday in Paris in peace. But they were as good as their word. "You must excuse us - my husband was a bit tired, and needed to rest for a while," Raine said. I couldn't help remembering that it was she who nursed him, willed him back to life ten or fifteen years ago, when he suffered a serious stroke and lay in hospital in a coma. She had never stopped talking to him for days, until he responded, and it was agreed in the family that she had "brought him back." "Are you all right, sir?" we asked. "Oh, yes, fine," said Lord Spencer. "Well," said Raine Spencer brightly, "where would you like us to stand?" She led her husband over Aubusson carpets into the great gilded and paneled corridor, its French windows opening onto the lovely indoors Ritz garden, and obligingly stood next to him in the best-lit spot, holding his arm and smiling. "We've been coming here for forty years," Lord Spencer said.

© Copyright Associated Newspapers - Mail on Sunday & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

CHARLOTTE AU CHOCOLAT

Ingredients for 6 to 8 servings
3 layers of sponge cake
Sponge fingers for a charlotte
1 cup (1/4 l) black coffee
Chocolate Mousse (recipe below)

Method
Brush the sponge cake layers with black coffee. Place one inside a flan ring on a serving platter. Slide the sponge fingers in-between the sides of the ring and the sponge base.

Pour a third of the mousse into the ring, smooth the surface and place the second sponge base on top. Fill with half the remaining mousse and cover with the remaining base.

Finish with the rest of the mousse. Decorate with chocolate curls and a dusting of icing sugar.

Refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Remove the flan ring before serving.

Mousse au Chocolat Ingredients:
5 tbsp (7cl) black coffee
9oz (250g) plain chocolate chopped into small pieces
1 cup (1/4 l) egg whites
6 tbsp (75g) sugar

Method
Heat the coffee in a small saucepan until it almost boils. Remove from the heat, add the chocolate and stir until smooth and creamy. Leave to cool.

Beat the egg whites until stiff, but not overly so, then fold in the sugar little by little until perfectly smooth. Combine a little of the whites with the chocolate, then transfer mixture to the remaining whites and fold in, using a spatula. The mousse should be perfectly smooth when finished.

N.B. The egg whites are easier to beat and much smoother if a little lemon juice is added to them first

© Copyright Escoffier Cookery School, Associated Newspapers - Mail on Sunday & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988