This is almost certainly the first and, I’ll bet plenty, last time anyone will compare the Canadian billionaire and Aston Martin Chairman Lawrence Stroll to the late American film star Marilyn Monroe. I understand that whenever she entered a room, everything that was going on therein simply stopped, like someone throwing a switch.
Stroll, perhaps for slightly different reasons, has the same effect. Tall and broad, he exudes presence like an industrial irrigator sprays water.
We meet in the boardroom of Aston Martin’s Gaydon headquarters, before lunching in the main atrium with the DB12, new Vantage, a revised DBX and the replacement for the DBS (details of which are embargoed until later in the year) arranged around us. Our chef is Larry Jayasekara, former head chef of Pétrus, Gordon Ramsey’s Michelin-starred Knightsbridge restaurant who serves up a meal of such obvious and exquisite delicacy I am left cursing that my heretical palate means its finer points are inevitably lost on me. Perhaps sensibly, there is no Chateau Pétrus to drink, just our choice of still or sparkling water.
Stroll is tanned and relaxed, the genial host in a grey suit, white shirt with a black and white handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket just below the obligatory Aston Martin lapel pin.
