Damehood for Shirley Conran in hospital bed
ShE has led the most extraordinary life, from writing bestsellers Superwoman and Lace to helping create one of our most talented design dynasties.
So what better final act for Shirley conran than to receive a damehood in her hospital bed?
‘My mum is on her final journey,’ says her son, the designer Jasper conran. ‘She is looking forward to her party in the sky with all her friends and family. She is very much enjoying listening to messages.’
Before yesterday’s unique investiture ceremony, Jasper explained: ‘This afternoon, she will be invested with her damehood in hospital. The Palace have been incredibly kind and agreed to do this.’
Dame Shirley, 91, who launched the Daily Mail’s Femail section in the 1960s, had been too unwell to travel to Buckingham Palace to collect the honour, which she was awarded in Liz Truss’s resignation honours list.
The former wife of habitat cofounder Sir Terence conran, who also has an elder son Sebastian, had told me in 2022 that she was surprised she still wasn’t a dame.
‘I sometimes wonder why I’m not, if you look at the people who are, especially if they’ve given a million pounds to some royal charity,’ she said.
In recent years, she devoted herself to helping people with anxiety about mathematics.
‘ I’ve spent over a million pounds of my money on the maths books,’ she explained. ‘There are a hell of a lot of actors who just go along, get paid £25,000 to cut a ribbon at the opening of a supermarket, then they say they’ve worked for charity and get made a dame for it.’
Dame Shirley, who coined the phrase ‘Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’, revealed her most dramatic challenge in 2020: surviving an operation to remove a brain tumour. ‘The odds were very high that I would die,’ she told me at the time.