■ DAME Joanna Lumley

has been painted by celebrated artists including Anthony Palliser but doesn’t buy the works. ‘I never want the paintings of myself — I do see it as a sort of vanity,’ she tells me at the opening of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries near Buckingham Palace. But the Ab Fab star, who lives in London with her husband, conductor and composer Stephen Barlow, explains: ‘I do have lots of paintings because I love art.’