Londoner's Diary: is David Beckham’s whisky a case of am-dram?

 
Plague of blue bottles: David Beckham in the advert for Haig Club whisky
18 November 2014

As former footballer David Beckham jets off to launch his new Haig Club whisky in Asia, the brand has not slipped down so easily in Britain. The drink was launched to great fanfare last month but perhaps Goldenballs doesn’t have the Midas touch when it comes to spirits.

Haig Club, a collaboration between Beckham and his wife Victoria’s former manager Simon Fuller, originally retailed at £45 but you can now pick it up for a bargain £37 at Asda and Amazon.

When it was released last month many commentators were polite about the drink. Specialist blog Master of Malt waxed lyrical about the fusion of flavours including “apple crumble, expressed lemon peel and a touch of mango, millionaire’s shortbread, banoffee pie, coconut milk, dried grass, orange Turkish delight and cardamom”. Since then, however, some whisky aficionados have begged to differ. One described it to us as tasting like “flowery vodka”, adding that it is “not for whisky drinkers”.

Beckham was criticised for endorsing the product due to his career in health and fitness, and all the promotional material sees him raise a glass to toast without ever sipping the stuff.

What’s more, the striking cobalt blue bottle feels heavier than usual and a luxury goods insider claims there have been incidents where shelves have buckled beneath the weight of the specially designed bottles. An Asda spokesman says he hasn’t heard of groaning shelves and Haig’s rep insists it is happy with sales but Beckham must be hoping the Christmas party season might lighten the load. Meanwhile, The Londoner is cracking open a new bottle of its favourite Auchentoshan.

Which shade of blue

“The wrong blue on a Tuesday afternoon is epically terrible,” declares style guru Peter York in BBC2’s upcoming documentary on Tatler. But what is the wrong shade? “For a certain set,” York tells The Londoner, “there used to be a codified aesthetic — and if you got it wrong, you were condemned for ever.” So sartorial etiquette is less strict now? “Gracious, no. It’s just got subtler, which is far more difficult.”

He still won’t tell us which blue, though.

The tale that dogs Frank Lloyd Wright

You take a dog to a kennel but you can’t make him lie. In response to a little boy’s letter in the Thirties, US architect Frank Lloyd Wright agreed to design the child’s puppy a doghouse. The correspondence was included in Shaun Usher’s anthology Letters of Notes — but only on one condition, as Usher revealed at last night’s 5x15 debate at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle. “The sting in the tail was the dog hated the doghouse, refused to go inside it.” said Usher. “The Lloyd Wright estate said I could use the letters but only if I left that fact out. So I did. But every time I do a talk about the book, I tell people.”

Reunited with the father of The Godfather

The Londoner has always been a Godfather fan so we were first in line last night to shake the hand of Francis Ford Coppola as he was honoured by Liberatum with a dinner at the Bulgari Hotel.

Happy days: Rachel Johnson and Gavin Turk (Picture: Dave Benett)
Dave Benett

The director was joined by writer Rachel Johnson while Sadie Frost arrived for a reunion. “I was lucky enough to work with him in Dracula,” she recalled. “I just fell in love with him. He’s the most amazing man but I haven’t seen him in 20 years.”

With that Frost headed over to reconnect, leaving us with model Eva Herzigova. The actress spent the evening with tailor Ozwald Boateng, who certainly seemed attentive to her measurements. Has she found the only man in England who can compete with 007 in the tux department?

Guests: Eva Herzigova and Olga Kurylenko (Picture: Dave Benett)
Dave Benett

Artistic licence rules in the NCP

Drivers pulling into the Brewer Street Car Park in Soho over the past few weeks must be wondering why such a fashionable crowd are hanging around its doors by the NCP ticket machines. It has, after all, been a while since motoring in London was sexy.

The secret lies on the third floor of the Art Deco car park, which has been turned into an occasional art space underneath its vast wood and glass roof, in a space run by the record company Vinyl Factory.

In October it played host to Conrad Shawcross’s Ada Project, a probing machine that gyrated mournfully to curated music. Last night the space was transformed once again into a maze for the works of artist and film-maker Quentin Jones who has worked with Chanel, Kenzo and Victoria Beckham in the past.

This show, entitled The Fractured and the Feline, was co-created with set designer Robert Storey.

“It’s wonderful to be able to have a space that can be designed, not just curated and pictures hung on walls,” Quentin told The Londoner, in among the halls of mirrors, her Man Ray-ish collage prints suspended from the roof and a pop-up communal dining room set up by Quentin’s sister, Jemima. It feels like the beginning of a new cultural hub for Soho — and there’s not even a whiff of petrol.

Carla Bruni to translate Band Aid into French

Carla Bruni has landed the challenging gig of translating Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? into French, especially impressive when one considers Bob Geldof has an in-house French translator of his own, in the form of fiancée Jeanne Marine. Charity, it seems, does not start at home. In case Mrs Sarkozy needs some help, we’ve made a start for her. “Savent-ils que c’est Noël.”

One does like to queue ...

On stage in the West End, the Prince Harry in Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III crows with excitement about discovering a place called “Sainsbury’s”, where he’s bought a “Scotch egg”.

Of course the real red-haired royal would never be so gauche. When The Londoner ran into him yesterday at Kensington’s Whole Foods Market, the third-in-line to the throne was calmly standing in line for the check-out, grinning underneath a baseball cap while waiting to purchase a pie, some hot chicken and a carton of coconut water. Surely he wasn’t stocking up on supplies for his overnight flight to Oman?

Princess Diana used to sneak the boys out of Kensington Palace and take them grocery shopping to ensure they got “an occasional bit of real-life experience”.

Good to see her son is still keepin’ it real.

Jobseeker of the day goes to... Max Clifford. The Spectator’s Steerpike says the PR guru has been calling talent management firms offering his services. Max is still behind bars.

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