Monte Carlo isn’t glamorous |
What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?
Keir Starmer has one card left to play
Jess Phillips’s resignation will be particularly painful for Starmer
It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. ‘What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don’t you think of it at all?’ he asked her. ‘I said something obvious and idiotic about the place being artificial,’ she recalled.
Well, she was bang on. I’ve just been in Monte Carlo for the first time and artificial is about the size of it. Mind you, I can take artificiality so long as it seems glamorous and glittering and fun. Monte Carlo nowadays has all the appearance of absurd amounts of wealth but very little in the way of glamour. I had thought of it as a place where the rich and disaffected, or the desperate, could lose money in style. You can lose the money all right, but in a dispiriting way.
The main casino building still looks terrifically imposing – the architects included Charles Garnier, who did the Paris Opera........