Lady Anne (right) during the full dress rehearsal of the Queen’s Coronation at Westminster Abbey, 1953
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Bonham Carter – who is her cousin by marriage – was a fellow guest when Lady Anne triumphed on The Graham Norton Show, drawing amazed gasps and whoops of laughter as she told the audience how her mother’s attempts at sex education revolved around her dog, Biscuit: ‘You remember Daddy’s labrador getting on top of Biscuit? Well, that’s what happens when you get married and have sex, except you’ll probably be lying down in a bed.’ She topped that with an account of Colin Tennant, her exuberant, frightening, half-crazed maverick multimillionaire of a husband, taking her, during their honeymoon, to watch a couple having sex in a seedy hotel room. They asked the still-virginal Lady Anne if she wanted to join in. She declined. (It might be argued that Lady Anne had married beneath her: Tennant, the eldest son and heir of the 2nd Baron Glenconner, was merely an Hon, whereas Lady Anne – née Coke – was the eldest of the three daughters of the 5th Earl of Leicester, robbed of the title and of Holkham Hall, the glorious Palladian house she was brought up in, by primogeniture. The title went to a cousin living in South Africa.)
Her friend Rupert Everett had advised her on how to approach Norton’s chat show: ‘Do it, Anne.’ And, she notes, ‘Olivia [Colman, another guest] lives in Norfolk’, so she knew people would be on her side; but it wasn’t until Chadwick Boseman, the star of Black Panther, came up to her afterwards, shook his head and said, ‘Gee whizz, lady!’ that she knew ‘I had done OK.’ More than OK: she’d become hot property. More books are to follow; there’s talk of a film; and, before the coronavirus lockdown, she had been gracing the better kind of provincial theatre with An Evening with Lady Glenconner. Not entirely a surprise: her mother, the Countess of Leicester, sent her out as a travelling saleswoman for her pottery in the UK and the USA. Shrinking violets can’t do that. And she certainly played her part in transforming Mustique, bought as a mosquito-ridden wasteland by her husband in the 1950s, into the ghetto for the rich and titled it is today. (Tennant acquired the island with some of the vast industrial fortune his family had made; some of that had gone on Glen, their estate in the Scottish Borders, where Colin – by then Lord Glenconner – once sprinkled the moors with blue paper flowers to mollify his aesthete uncle Stephen, who thought heather vulgar.)
Still, ‘showbiz star’ is not the figure she cuts in her kitchen, giving herself a Nescafé and me a builder’s, served in cups and saucers decorated with red birds and flowers. Her streaked hair is beautifully cut, her flat black shoes shiny and her blouse a strong purple. In the loo is a framed copy of the Woman’s Journal; on its cover, goldenhaired and ravishing, is a young Lady Anne Coke, as Glenconner was then – Greta Garbo gets one of the other coverlines. In the living room, the log fire is blazing – Princess Margaret used to insist on laying it when she stayed, during the many decades Lady Anne was her lady-in-waiting. There are family photographs on multitudinous side tables, a Daily Telegraph crossword open on a window seat and a coffee table book about Holkham Hall on a small green ottoman. Outside, through the sash windows, is the garden that Lady Anne used to weed while Princess Margaret washed her hostess’s car. A cock pheasant shoots past the window. ‘That’s Colin’s spirit,’ Lady Anne says, laughing. ‘Colin getting angry – I’d never have got a word in if he’d been here.’