Greatest lunch of the year?

On this day last year we hosted the first Forest Summer Lunch & Awards.

The venue was Boisdale of Belgravia and we had exclusive use of the restaurant and terrace from midday to 4.00pm.

A handful of guests stayed well beyond that and we were still on the terrace, drinking and, in some cases, smoking, when the news came through that health secretary Sajid Javid had resigned from Boris Johnson’s government.

Within half an hour our phones were lighting up all over again with the further revelation that Rishi Sunak had resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It was a remarkable few minutes - a real ‘Where were you?’ moment - because everyone realised that Boris’s days as PM were numbered and, whatever your opinion of him, it did feel like treachery.

The truth is though that the Westminster village lives for moments like that so there was a palpable sense of excitement and intrigue as we arranged to reconvene later at the Marquis of Granby, a pub close to the Houses of Parliament where Westminster politicos tend to hang out.

Anyway, this year’s Summer Lunch & Awards is on July 18.

After one or two false starts we put it back a couple of weeks because there were so many other events in June and early July we didn’t want it to clash with any of them.

Fortunately that decision seems to have been vindicated because the 2023 Summer Lunch has been fully subscribed for several weeks and we currently have a waiting list.

Guests include journalists and writers, think tanks, parliamentary researchers, and a handful of parliamentarians, so I’m looking forward to it.

I should add that Boisdale MD Ranald Macdonald is a busy man.

As well as co-hosting the Forest Summer Lunch with me on July 18, he is also hosting the Boisdale Editor’s Lunch on July 12.

The first Editor’s Lunch was at Boisdale of Belgravia in 2017. (I wrote about it here.)

The following year it moved to Boisdale of Canary Wharf, a much larger venue, where we held Forest’s 40th anniversary dinner in 2019 and, before that, the Forest Freedom Dinner that ran from 2012 to 2017.

The Editor’s Lunch was paused by Covid but returned in 2021 whereupon I found myself sitting next to the hugely entertaining Simon Bartholomew, guitarist with The Brand New Heavies, and ‘New Orleans singing sensation Acantha Lang'. (See ‘That’s life’.)

In an email to this year’s guests Ranald describes The Editor’s Lunch as ‘The greatest lunch of the year’, adding that guests will include ‘an eclectic bunch of journalists, economists, politicians, authors, musicians, generals, food writers, wine producers and chefs’.

He may be right but I hope our more modest event at Boisdale of Belgravia doesn’t disappoint!