Tower and Town, September 2024 (view the full edition)Sonia Purnell - KingmakerWhen Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997, her obituaries were scathing. The Daily Mail paid a tribute of sorts: "When historians look back on the twentieth century," it said, "they will find traces of Pamela Harriman's lipstick all over it." Another dismissed her as expert only in the subject of "rich men's ceilings". Yet Bill Clinton, whom Harriman had handpicked and backed for President, gave an eight-minute eulogy at her funeral, recalling her as "an active life force in the greatest continuing alliance for freedom the world has ever known". Sonia Purnell charts Pamela's journey from her birth into the Dorset Digby family in 1920, through her early years as a "fat and freckly" schoolgirl and dismal debutante, to her precipitous marriage aged 19 to Randolph Churchill - and thence to the heart of power. Adopted by her in-laws - she called Clementine and Winston Churchill "Mama" and "Papa" - Pamela was set to work wooing key visiting Americans to the British cause against Hitler during WWII. So began a lifetime of wielding her considerable charms to political effect, culminating in being appointed US Ambassador to France in 1993. It's a tale of sex, fabulous clothes and even more fabulous parties played out over two continents. Purnell combines rigorous research with a novelist's eye for detail as she argues Pamela's case not as a saint but as a serious political contender. We see the cracks behind the perfect maquillage - Pamela's ultimate vulnerability as a woman trying to make her way in a male-dominated world. But who can resist being swept up in the sheer chutzpah of the "Pam Power" parade? Enter the seductive world of Pamela Churchill Harriman in the Town Hall at 10am on Saturday 28 September 
Credit Charlie Hopkinson 
Marie-Vere Parr |