The Inimitable Nicky Haslam
The man who knows all about the Royals and nearly everyone else who matters in Britain
Only a couple of weeks ago, 86-year-old Nicky Haslam, the legendary interior designer, writer, social arbiter, partygoer, magazine editor, cabaret singer, art director, and indefatigable man-about-town announced in a newspaper interview that on Christmas he would be “Alone. Asleep. Doing Nothing. Wonderful”—all of which seemed rather unlikely. When I caught up with him for a phone conversation on New Year’s Eve, he had reassuringly returned to form. “I had a very merry Christmas actually,” he said. “I was all over the place: Rebekah Brooks [chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK], the Bamfords [billionaire industrialist Baron Bamford and his wife, Baroness Bamford, who own the Daylesford estate in the Cotswolds where Nicky lives in a charming gatehouse], and then I went to somebody else. I had a wow of a time.”
“The best-connected man in Britain”
Nicholas Ponsonby Haslam has managed to be famous for seven decades, and to be known as the “best-connected man in Britain.” He and I met in June 1991, when I interviewed him for Reflected Glory, my biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, the fabled British courtesan. His first words about her grabbed my imagination and launched our friendship:
“I went to Eton with Little Winston [Pamela’s son with Randolph Churchill and grandson of Sir Winston Churchill]. ‘Do you want to have tea with my mother?’ he said. We waited in the rain at New School’s yard. Slowly a burnished cabriolet Rolls-Royce with lights on inside turned into the gate. Pam was in back, wearing a blond rough tweed suit, blond fur coat, and very restrained country jewelry. The door opened, and out on the running board was a perfectly shod crocodile foot and an arm with a perfect crocodile bag. It was my first knowledge of living a glamorous life, absolutely imprinted on my memory.”
Over the following years, Nicky has generously and repeatedly helped me in my research for books on Diana, Princess of Wales, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. He has offered introductions and shared his knowledge and insights over lunches and dinners, giving me an invaluable inside track. He has taken me on his evening peregrinations (typically four or five parties), a memorable dinner with Lucian Freud and Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon at the Wolseley in London, a dinner party at Lady Avon’s flat, and a lunch with Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of Queen Elizabeth II’s bridesmaids. When Nicky did his cabaret act at Bellamy’s in Mayfair, I sat in the audience and applauded his crooning renditions of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, and Noel Coward. For the past seven years, he has shot to even greater prominence with his annual irreverent tea towels (he calls them “drying-up cloths”) listing the “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common.” They’re priced at £50 or £70 if signed by Nicky. They’re so popular, Nicky told me, that “some people buy ten at a time for Christmas presents.”
I have watched with a mixture of bemusement and admiration at Nicky’s series of makeovers, from Savile Row suits to biker leather, nose rings, earrings, and dyed black hair to his current country gentleman incarnation of heathery sweaters and corduroy trousers. He makes no secret of his 1999 facelift and neck-lift three years later (“to get rid of the wattles”). He was diagnosed early with colon cancer in 2010, and was cured after radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy. He has always been emphatically gay, and in his 2009 memoir he revealed that he had a brief fling with Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1959, a year before the society portrait photographer married Princess Margaret and became Lord Snowdon. Nicky also had a “relationship” with Roddy Llewellyn, who later became the princess’s lover. For reasons I’ll explain below, Nicky and I have called each other “Hubs” and “Wifey” since 2008.
Nicky is the son of Diamond Louise Constance Ponsonby, a goddaughter of Queen Victoria and a granddaughter of the 7th Earl of Bessborough. His father was William Heywood Haslam, a diplomat whose family made a fortune from cotton mills in Lancashire. During Nicky’s childhood in a seventeenth-century manor house in Buckinghamshire, he was bedridden for three years with polio. After Eton, he bounced from New York to Arizona to Los Angeles before returning to London and establishing himself as an interior designer with clients ranging from Russian oligarchs to Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry, and Mark Shand, the brother of future Queen Camilla. There is, quite simply, no one of significance he doesn’t know, including members of the royal family. The walls of the “lavvy” on the first floor of his country house are filled with framed letters from an assortment of royals. Princess Diana was a distant cousin through the Ponsonby line.
“She is just carrying on, whatever is happening”
The last time I had dinner with Nicky was in March 2024, at Colbert on Sloane Square in London, seven weeks after King Charles had revealed his cancer diagnosis and five days following the poignant video message from Catherine, the Princess of Wales that she had cancer as well. Rumors were swirling, social media was bursting with speculation, and Nicky had been feeling doom and gloom. But when he saw Queen Camilla at the Cheltenham races earlier in the month, “She came in all smiles.” She was a longtime friend and gave him a hug. “She is just carrying on, whatever is happening.”
Now, nearly two years later, I thought it would be a good moment to check in with Nicky to get his thoughts on how the royal family is faring and how they compare with their forbears. But first, the story of Hubs and Wifey….
