29.

It was the Centenary Celebration year of Vogue (launched 1916), and we planned a huge dinner and jamboree in a marquee in Hyde Park. Very few magazines last for a hundred years, and those that do are generally limping and stumbling to the finish. But Vogue was storming ahead, and we wanted to make the most of the Centenary with a bonanza Vogue Festival, specially decorated shop windows across the nation, a Centenary issue with a royal front cover, and a Centenary Vogue dinner rammed with fashion designers, celebrities and friends of the magazine.

It is remarkable that British Vogue had been launched at all in the middle of the First World War, while the Battle of the Somme was raging. There was paper rationing and clothes rationing, and I would like to have listened in on the business case discussion: ‘Gentlemen, we have no paper to print it on, and no clothes to photograph, but this is the perfect moment to start a luxury fashion magazine. We must strike while the iron is hot …’ Nobody could have predicted the extraordinary magazine Vogue would turn out to be, showcasing every important photographer, decade after decade, from Cecil Beaton to Norman Parkinson to David Bailey, and all the way to Nick Knight, Alasdair McLellan, and Mert and Marcus.

Alexandra Shulman persuaded the Duchess of Cambridge to do her first official magazine shoot. She was styled-down in an Amish-style wide-brimmed hat, and looked funky: a cross between Boy George and the singer-songwriter James Bay. The Centenary dinner was fabulous, entered down a tunnel of a thousand Vogue covers, awash with supermodels, politicians, designers, photographers and alumni. I made a speech, and Alex made a speech, and it was unexpectedly emotional. I had a lump in my throat. Perhaps it was hay fever?

Was I alone in detecting a faint fin de siècle mood in the air? Alex had edited Vogue for a quarter of a century, and the Centenary felt like a celebration and culmination of her tenure. She hadn’t yet disclosed her plan to step down, but it didn’t really surprise me when she did.

The question I get asked most often is, ‘Will magazines survive?’ To which my answer is, ‘Yes, definitely, and the strong ones will survive in print form too, well beyond our lifetimes.’ But the weaker ones, the hazier propositions, the number threes and number fours in each category, were already suffering. You could see the change when travelling on trains and on the underground. Only a decade earlier, when you walked through the carriages, you saw dozens of young women, faces buried in a Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire or Glamour. Now they were staring, mesmerized, Moonie-like, at smartphones, waiting for a message or a Like, or an emoji, to drop onto their screens. The circulations of middle-market titles were falling like stones into a well. Even Glamour, our shooting star, wasn’t immune, with a new digital-first business model, and only a couple of print editions a year. But the upmarket British titles – the hard-core glossies – were defying gravity and holding on tight. So far, nobody has invented a digital way to replicate the gloss and sheen of a printed glossy, or the way that ink shimmers on the page, like moonlight on the surface of a lake.

Nevertheless, you couldn’t escape the uneasy feeling that the best of the Glossy Years lay behind us rather than ahead: the unprecedented thirty-year run of supercharged growth and glory. Suddenly no major publishing company was launching new print titles, perhaps never will again. The job now was to manage the portfolio, in expectation of future decline, without precipitating that decline by inadvertently provoking it, by cutting budgets and reducing staff numbers so much that it showed on the pages.

Our International Board Meetings, once devoted to discussions about expansion and editorial quality, now seldom included those topics at all. Instead, we devoted ourselves to agreeing corporate positioning papers on morals and ethics, and commissioning teams of consultants to conduct studies into ten-year prospects. For years, the only sin for which a Condé Nast Managing Director could be fired was failure to launch enough new magazines quickly enough; now this principle was reversed. Our digital efforts redoubled, with hordes of recruits specializing in user satisfaction, content management and best practice. All of it felt absolutely logical and sensible, but less to do with journalism.

To clear my brain, I had developed a taste for holidays in dangerous places, or anyway in places which sounded dangerous but turned out not to be. With Alexander, Freddie and Tommy I embarked on a ‘boys’ adventure’ in a jeep across Eastern Turkey, along the borders with Syria, Iran and former Soviet Georgia. It was exciting to drive along the dusty, deserted, mountainous roads from Diyarbakir to Mardin and then further south to Dara, where the tracks run parallel to the razor-wire frontier with Syria. And to revisit, for the first time in decades, the scarcely changed archaeological sites at Nemrut Daği and Ani, and the Noah’s Ark Museum at Mount Ararat (surely the crummiest museum in the world). Eastern Turkey remains one of the least developed parts of Asia, and it was refreshing to stay in authentically scuzzy dives; the Southern Anatolians lead the field in flea-infested mattresses. I have a theory that, if you stay only in grand hotels, and never stay anywhere grotty, you lose all sense of perspective, and become crabby and dissatisfied, and end up shouting at housekeeping for failing to replenish the nuts or the bath salts. It was good for the soul to stay in the last available hotel room in Van, all four of us piled in. The alternative was sleeping in the jeep.

After a fortnight on the road, we flew to the other side of Turkey to live it up a bit. The Maçakızı in Bodrum may be the coolest hotel on earth. Most of the guests are models or fashion designers, many the same ones who’d been at our Centenary Vogue dinner.

It took an hour or two, after the dosshouses of the East, to acclimatize to the pulsing beat and overpowering glamour of the Maçakızı.

We were having dinner on the terrace, when Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell rolled up at the next table.

Kate came over. ‘Oy, Nick, oy’ve got a bown to pick wiv yow …’

As she started, it all came flooding back. A few months earlier, it had been reported in the newspapers that Kate had bought Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s former home in Highgate. The opium-smoking poet had only, in fact, lived there for a few years, and the house had changed hands many times in between.

But the Evening Standard, spotting an angle, had rung me about it. ‘What do the Coleridge family feel about Kate Moss buying your old ancestral home?’

I had replied, ‘We’re delighted. It means the house will never again be associated with drug abuse.’

Londoner’s Diary went big with it, illustrating the item with headshots of Kate, STC and me.

Kate said, ‘About forty of me mates rang me about it. They found it very funny. Which I s’pose it woz, really.’

The boys were thrilled by the arrival of Kate Moss at our table, and her public grumble.

I have a recurring daydream. In this dream, I buy a red Routemaster London bus, customize it, and drive it overland to India. Or, more precisely, someone else does the driving, while I inhabit the upper deck, decorated to the highest spec.

The London bus daydream kicks in most nights. The front quarter of the top deck has been shorn off and opened up, to create an outdoor area with banquette seating, with steps to a sundeck on the roof. There is a large bed, floor-length curtains, lined and interlined, in a Robert Kime or Bennison fabric. Carpets, rugs, a small sofa, and paintings secured to the walls complete the scene. With the curtains drawn, you might think you were in an English country house bedroom.

The bus is sometimes parked on a plateau overlooking Chittorgarh fort in Rajasthan. I am sitting with friends on the balcony, drinking cold beers, and enjoying the view from our high, safe vantage point.

How would a psychotherapist interpret the dream? Probably they would seize on the juxtaposition of rugged, adventurous locations and the hermetic sanctuary of the upper deck, immune from intrusion.

As a child, I loved the original 1964 Jonny Quest TV series, an action-meets-sci-fi cartoon. In the closing credits, you saw Jonny sprinting towards his spacecraft across a hostile African savannah, pursued by native tribesmen. He reached the spaceship just in time, the door slid shut, and was immediately embossed by a dozen shuddering spears. Inside, Jonny was perfectly safe. Perhaps here lay the origin of my fantasy?

I have a taste for bare, craggy landscapes over verdant ones: Eastern Turkey, Iran, large tracts of India, in which the occasional tree clings to sun-baked terrain. Georgia is the exact opposite. She favours lush green fields, untrimmed hedgerows, unmanaged woods. And gently overcast skies. To me, a day without sunshine is a wasted day.

Georgia and I took Sophie and Tommy to Iran, with Nick and Sarah Allan. And later the same year we went as a family to Ethiopia, to trek in the Tigray mountains and to visit the rock churches at Lalibela, and camp amidst the yellow and lime-green sulphur pools and salt flats of the Danakil Depression, near the Eritrean border. There was some remote danger of Eritrean militia swarming over the frontier and kidnapping us for ransom, so we were obliged to hire four bodyguards with Kalashnikovs, who posed for selfies all day in the blazing sunshine.

One evening, our guide proposed an outing to Lalibela’s only nightclub, Torpedoes. We set off in a convoy of white Land Cruisers, feeling like Richard Onslow Roper and the cast of John le Carré’s The Night Manager. As we approached the club, the drivers pulled over to the grassy kerb.

Unfortunately, the driver taking Georgia and I misjudged the distance, and suddenly the jeep was balancing over the edge of a deep ravine. Then it tipped and fell over the side, rolling and rolling, turning over, upside down, upright again, then over, while we were thrown about inside. From the cliff edge, our children could hear the vehicle crashing into the gorge, but could see nothing in the darkness. We hit a stone shepherd’s hut and the jeep came to rest.

Miraculously, we crawled out unhurt, only bruised, and clambered back up the ravine. The jeep was a write-off.

Torpedoes is the best, indeed only, nightclub in Lalibela, with its blood-red walls and vintage photographs of Emperor Haile Selassie. We drank a lot of gin to recover. The Mail on Sunday gossip column, which somehow heard the news, headlined ‘Vogue chief in miracle escape after cliff plunge’, which was over-egging it slightly.

Shortly afterwards, in celebration of being alive, I commissioned a folly for the walled garden at Wolverton. It is a tower, an octagon, forty-two feet in height, in a Tudor-meets-early-Georgian style with a nod to the folly at Long Melford Hall in Suffolk. The architect is the great Quinlan Terry,fn1 whom I have long admired. The piano nobile will be my study, with views towards Bredon Hill, and there is a viewing platform on the roof with just about space for four people to sit and have drinks. It is a place to escape to in my retirement, and generally stew.

I had become an Ambassador for the Landmark Trust, a delightful sinecure mostly, but fun to support its Director, the gorgeous historian Anna Keay,fn2 and Chairman, Neil Mendoza,fn3 on such a noble, heritage cause. I also became a Patron of the Elephant Family, Mark Shand’s environmental charity to save the Asian elephant, run by the charismatic Ruth Powys. The Elephant Family is an easy venture to support, being glamorous, energetic and authentic all at the same time. With Georgia and Sophie, I travelled across Rajasthan with a hundred other elephant supporters on tuk-tuks, motorcycles and chagdas (highly decorated Indian wedding vehicles), sleeping in Rajput tents at night and partying on remote sand dunes. Funds raised are spent on protecting the elephants’ migratory routes through the jungle.

Our children were growing up fast, children no more. Alexander was twenty-seven and tall, a thinker and strategy wonk, recently returned from a long stint in New York and an apartment in Brooklyn, following four years at Trinity College, Dublin. Now a charming and resourceful start-up entrepreneur, and engaged to be married to his girlfriend Davina Collas.

Freddie is even taller at six feet five, with a corporate job at Amazon in Shoreditch. Funny, social, a communicator, he has a gift for impressions and accents. His impressions of me, though grossly exaggerated and over-posh, are disconcertingly recognizable.

Sophie has just finished her Art History degree at Edinburgh and is starting her first job as a headhunter. Pretty, a creative dresser, organized, impulsive, serious in her studies, she has inherited her parent’s FOMO and will drive any distance in her red Mini to a party.

Tommy is our most laid-back, arguably most artistic child, studying Architecture at Edinburgh. For years, being the youngest, the family errand boy: ‘Tommy, go and fetch some crisps. Tommy, we need ice. Tommy, get some beers.’ But latterly on strike. Once faintly resembling Harry Potter in his glasses, now cultivating a cooler, metropolitan architect look.

We are lucky that our children, despite periodic explosions of inter-sibling fury, mostly get along together very well and, furthermore, tolerate their parents. They remain available for all-expenses-paid summer holidays, and visit us regularly in London and Worcestershire, bringing their friends for weekends, and come and go as they please. In the end, nothing matters quite so much as a functioning family and the belief that, for decades to come, even after you are gone, your children might continue to see each other, and like one another, and watch each other’s backs where they can.

Georgia, meanwhile, has expanded her healing practice and written important books about sacral chakras and the power of spiritual energy, published to acclaim.

I had idly begun reading a book named Coal Baron, a semi-fictionalized history of my mother’s maternal ancestors, the Joicey family of Northumberland. As mentioned near the start of these memoirs, my grandmother had often spoken about her childhood at Ford Castle, and the lucky discovery in the mid-nineteenth century of deep seams of coal beneath their estate. The coal mines, conveniently situated some distance from the castle, were never discussed in detail.

Coal Baron overturned this version of family history, in its entirety. Far from discovering coal under the estate, my ancestors had been actual coal miners, working underground with pickaxes down the pits in the 1820s, near Chester-le-Street in County Durham. Rising to foreman, the first James Joicey was able to buy the pit, then a dozen more. His nephew, the 1st Lord Joicey, bought all Lord Lambton’s coal mines, then more and more pits across the North-East, until he was the largest coal owner in the world at the time. The Ford and Etal estates followed later, along with the peerage, paintings and the rest.

My previously undisclosed working-class coalmining roots were rather an enticing surprise, perhaps explaining my work ethic, and also, perhaps, my dislike of dark and confined spaces.

In his early eighties, my father started to become forgetful, which accelerated noticeably over three or four years into dementia, then Alzheimer’s. Sensibly, my parents sold the house in Sussex just in time and consolidated their lives in London, at their tall white house in Egerton Terrace. For my mother, full-time life in Egerton Terrace meant she had moved precisely 100 yards in eighty years from her childhood home in Egerton Place.

Each time we went round for a drink or for dinner, the deterioration in my father’s brain was more evident, it was as though whole sections of his memory were shutting down, room by room, beginning in the present and working backwards. If you asked him, ‘Did you enjoy going to lunch at Daphne’s [a favourite neighbourhood restaurant] yesterday, Dad?’ he wouldn’t remember anything about it. But, for a while at least, he could talk about his early days working at Lloyd’s, and going racing in Windsor with friends from school, and rowing on the Thames to Queen’s Eyot and Boveney Lock.

He sat in his favourite armchair at the window, overlooking the front garden, holding the Daily Telegraph, though no longer able to decode the words on the pages. A tumbler of well-watered J&B whisky sat beside him on a table. My mother, and various carers, kept him conspicuously smart, always dressed in a jacket, shirt and tie, cardigan. Until you spoke to him, you would have imagined he was perfectly fit and well, handsome and well presented, hair neatly brushed. As time went by, he slept more, and went upstairs to bed earlier and earlier, impatient of conversation. We would visit him for a drink in my parents’ bedroom, where he was propped up on a pillow, in pink New & Lingwood pyjamas and a navy-blue silk dressing gown. My parents’ wedding photographs, taken more than sixty years earlier, when they were still practically teenagers, by Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon, stood on a chest of drawers, as they had in every bedroom they ever inhabited; the linen and eiderdown were always perfectly laundered, the whole room smelling faintly of my mother’s scent.

It is said that, as your life closes in, and especially when Alzheimer’s takes hold, your conversation narrows until eventually you become the pure essence of yourself, your vocabulary increasingly a matter of instinct and habit. So it was with my father. When our children went round to visit, he would say, ‘Now, Tommy, have you started at Eton yet?’ and then ask the same question again ten minutes later, ‘Have you started at Eton?’ and then again. Or he would ask Freddie, who was already twenty-four, ‘Now, remind me, which house at Eton are you in?’ Or he would amble around the drawing room, holding a bottle of wine, courteously enquiring, ‘Would you like a glass of wine? Or would you prefer a gin and tonic?’ Eton and the family ritual of pre-lunch and pre-dinner drinks; it all boiled down to that.

Many people with dementia become furious with frustration against the world, but my father seldom did. Instead, he drifted away in benign contentment, gradually speaking less, until he fell almost silent, fading gently from the stage.

I have several particular pictures of my father in my photograph albums, taken before the Alzheimer years at the end, which is how I remember him: taking Alexander and Freddie racing at Goodwood as schoolboys, the three of them standing side by side in panama hats, the azaleas behind in full bloom; circulating at some Lloyd’s of London drinks party in a navy-blue suit, confident and charismatic, the big dog; sitting with my mother on a garden bench at their fiftieth wedding anniversary lunch, the epitome of relaxed happiness.

I stepped back from my big roles at Condé Nast, and became Chairman of the British group for a few wind-down years. My old job was divided between three excellent successors: I was glad my loyal deputy of ten years, Albert Read, became Managing Director of the British company; James Woolhouse became COO of International, and took on most of my gruelling overseas company visits; a bright German digital expert, Wolfgang Blau, took on the rest of my Presidential duties. All of them seemed perfect appointments.

Quite a number of my colleagues took the cue, over the ensuing months, to call it a day at Condé Nast; there was a sense of an unusually tight team, successfully intact for twenty-five years or more, disbanding, and new faces refreshing the party. Edward Enninful came to Vogue as Editor-in-Chief in a blaze of publicity, Richard Dennen inherited Tatler from Kate Reardon, Jo Elvin moved to the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, Nicky Eaton to Christie’s, Graydon Carter departed Vanity Fair, Si Newhouse died in Manhattan, and Stephen Quinn, Annie Holcroft and Trisha Stevenson all retired. But the magazines continued to appear, right on cue, and I still feel an excited buzz of anticipation, opening them up, when a new issue lands on my desk.

The years after I downsized at Condé Nast, and felt the decades of responsibility melt away like a man on a massage table, were amongst the happiest of my working life. The perpetual low-level anxieties which had coloured my days, and which I had worked so hard to conceal, fell away along with a 50 per cent decline in the number of emails, and the long-haul business travel. I no longer worried incessantly about circulation, profitability or margins. Some people suffer intense withdrawal symptoms from any reduction in responsibility, but I felt none. I felt like someone who had swum a thousand miles through raging seas and reached, at last, a calm lagoon, and crawled up onto warm white sands. The fact that the Victoria and Albert Museum was booming was a bonus; visitor numbers continued to rise, and our new satellite museums in Shenzhen and Dundee were opening at dizzying speed. Furthermore, the new V&A East on the Olympic Park was all systems go.

I kept an office in Vogue House, and my relationship with the company transformed into one of an affectionate godfather, delighted by their successes, benignly spectating, but no longer engaged in the minute-by-minute struggle for supremacy and survival. I shuttled between Hanover Square and South Kensington, often several times a day, back and forth, back and forth, and it was a sweet period.

People habitually underestimate the importance of luck, and the importance of timing, in life and in any career. Had I not written that first article for Harpers & Queen, and had Ann Barr not read my handwritten submission and bothered to type it out, I might never have become a journalist at all. Had I not come up with the punning headline ‘Saturday Night Belvoir’ in my interview with Tina Brown, I might never have worked for her or for Tatler. Had I not sat next to Louis Kirby at Richard Compton-Miller’s dinner in Fulham, I might never have been given my Evening Standard column. Had my mother not been at the hairdresser in Walton Street, and read about my incarceration in Welikada Prison in Sri Lanka, I might still be there now.

Had Georgia not done work experience at Harpers & Queen, and had I not come into the office on that particular day, we might never have met. Had the Newhouse family not owned Condé Nast … had Mark Boxer not died young … had Daniel Salem not read The Fashion Conspiracy on holiday in Lucca … had Prince Albert not founded the Victoria and Albert Museum … I could have lived an entirely different life.

Had Charles Moore not advised me to get into Trinity College, Cambridge, the easy way by reading Theology, I would have gone somewhere completely different and made entirely different friends. Had I not travelled across India on the Bombay–Madras Express during my Around the World adventure, I might never have fallen in love with that wonderful country, and never have returned more than eighty times. And, had I not already loved India so much, I might not have followed Georgia out to Rajasthan, married my soulmate and had our four children.

I think it is lucky if you know what it is you like doing from an early age, and then find you can get paid for doing it, and turn it into a whole enjoyable career.

In the end, almost everything is about luck, and whether or not it finds you, and whether you find it. And having found it, whether you fix it with a glittering eye and hold on tight while the going is good.

He holds him with his glittering eye –

the Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years’ child:

The Mariner hath his will.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1797)