Londoner’s Diary
The red carpet was rolled out at the National Portrait Gallery for its annual fundraiser gala. The evening was co-hosted by NPG chair Victoria Siddall and a group of women with various connections to the gallery. Artist Jenny Saville recently had an exhibition there, while a portrait of Zadie Smith is on display. Fashion designer Bella Freud designed the napkins for the evening, and her father Lucian Freud’s drawings and paintings are currently on the walls. Cash was raised during a silent auction: James Corden got himself an ashtray signed by David Hockney for £4,200, which features one of the artist’s iPad drawings. A snip, compared to the £40,000 tech entrepreneur Viktor Proponya shelled out for a tour of the Slow Horses set with Kristin Scott Thomas. Then there was the obligatory performance of Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor before dancing in Larry’s bar in the bowels of the gallery. Guests included fashion designer father and daughter John and Simone Rocha, model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and the co-creator of TV show Industry, Konrad Kay.
Ashtrays are of great importance to David Hockney, who once said that he smokes for his “mental health”. The Serpentine Galleries are not one to question this, but the trouble is, they have a no-smoking policy. So at the preview party for Hockney’s new exhibition there, a little black mental-health shed was installed in the courtyard which the 88-year-old could make use of. Sadly, Hockney didn’t make it that evening. Artist Tracey Emin was there, though she says smoking is her number one regret.
Over at Brooks’s in St James’s, historian Alice Loxton and actress Genevieve Gaunt toasted Tim Bouverie, who won the Duff Cooper non-fiction prize for Allies at War, a narrative history of World War II. The prize was £5,000 and a magnum of Pol Roger champagne, though not all of the publicity for the book has brought such joy. On the day that the US attacked Iran, Bouverie was perturbed to see a photograph of Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone with Donald Trump, in which Allies at War was artfully placed on the Israeli PM’s desk. “It doesn’t appear as if the book had been read,” he noted.
