Cold Cream: My Early Life And Other Mistakes
By Ferdinand Mount, Bloomsbury, £15

Ferdinand Mount has dabbled in many things: leader-writing, speech writing, writing novels, politics and being a full-time London socialite. He went to Sunningdale School from where he won a scholarship to Eton College, and then made the natural journey to Christ Church, Oxford. At the House (as Christ Church is fondly called in Oxford), he tried first to study PPE, got bored and finished doing Modern Languages. Neither at Eton nor in Oxford, by his own account, did he make a mark as a literary figure, so no one was surprised when he began his adult life doing odd jobs in London and running up a huge overdraft. The latter facility was extended to him under the mistaken assumption of the manager of Barclay’s Bank that Mount was an heir to a fortune. He was saved from financial disaster when Lord Rothermere gave him a job in the Daily Sketch.

Mount did not inherit a fortune, but his provenance on his mother’s side was aristocratic. His mother, Lady Julia Pakenham, was the daughter of Lord Longford who fell at Gallipoli. Julia in her time was the toast of Oxford, and she went out briefly with Isaiah Berlin. She married a champion steeplechase jockey, lived in the Salisbury plains and died young.

This memoir has three distinct parts. The first is his early life, growing up in the country, school, and memories of his parents. The second concerns Oxford and Mount’s excursions in the world of media. The third is about Mount’s days in 10 Downing Street as one of Margaret Thatcher’s advisors.

Like most upper class British public school boys, Mount found it difficult to express his private emotions. This book is an attempt to break out of that straitjacket. He was very fond of his mother, but the only account he gives of some sort of physical contact between mother and son is of her applying Pond’s Cold Cream (the only form of make-up that Lady Julia needed, as her complexion looked after itself) to Ferdy’s chapped skin or to soothe his cut forehead. There is thus an element of irony in the name of the book. Irony, in fact, is an important element in the book as Mount uses it to look at his own and his class’s many quirks.

Mount begins in his teens, with a tour of Italy that he did with his mother and then goes backwards and forwards. The first part is by far the most evocative: delightful descriptions of the Salisbury countryside; being taught in Eton by none other than David Cornwell — called Corny by his students, but more famous later as John le Carré; and of Henry Blofeld giving a running commentary of a cricket match even as a schoolboy. The second part is more riotous, with recollections of parties in Oxford and endless bouts of drinking with Fleet Street veterans interspersed with attempts at edit writing. Finally there is life with Margaret.

Here one gets an insider’s account of how things were run from Downing Street, the opposition the Iron Lady faced within her cabinet and how indecisive she could at times be.

The real charm of Mount’s book is in the way he writes. The prose is flawless, never purple even when it is evocative. The book is full of humour and a sense of fun. Mount has a splendid sense of the outrageous. He is obsessive about family trees and addicted to which school the varied dramatis personae of his memoirs went.

Like most things of beauty, Mount’s memoirs have a dash of sadness, of things and dear ones lost, of a world gone forever.