Ian Callum, once designer of Jags, now designer of luxury hotel suite featuring many bits of Jag

Given Jaguar hasn’t built a single production car since December 2025, one worries that a ‘Jaguar’ hotel suite might be an empty room with nary a bed to lay one’s head. Or, were it inspired by the controversial Type 00 design concept, it would be voluminous, decorated pink, and upon check-in you’d be presented with a very long choice of pronouns. Then you’d be told your room won’t be ready for two and a half years. And it might not actually be the room you booked.

Thankfully, at Taj’s 51 Buckingham Gate Suites & Residences, ‘The Jaguar Suite’ has no recollection of recent corporate mismanagement. It has been designed by Ian Callum, who was Jaguar’s director of design until mid-2018, right up to the point it stopped being Jaguar as we know it: seven-times winner of Le Mans, trademark holder of ‘the growler’, and automotive outfitter to Inspector Morse, Arthur Daley, Mrs Thatcher and the Kray twins. Callum did his best to move the brand along, and gave it two of the prettiest production cars of the 21^st century thus far: the F-Type Coupé and the fourth-generation XJ. He also did Ford’s RS200 and Escort Cosworth and Aston Martin’s DB7, DB9 and Vanquish, making him one of the greatest car designers of all time.

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And it turns out he’s a dab hand at interior design, too. Taj’s 170sq m two-bedroom Jaguar Suite features various Jaguar-inspired artworks, framed black-and-white photos, enamel badges and knick-knacks, and bookcases filled with weighty tomes about the company’s sporting and cultural heritage and 90 years of elegant craftsmanship. But it’s the unique accoutrements that catch the eye, like the sitting room’s gas fireplace, rendered in glass and steel, that Callum sketched to look like something aerodynamic, or a convertible hard-top maybe. After dinner at the hotel’s exquisite southern Indian restaurant, Quilon, I returned to the suite to find an assortment of cakes decorated with an E-Type and the C-X75 that a baddie drove in Spectre.

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Taj Hotels is part of the Tata Group, India’s largest conglomerate, which also owns Jaguar Land Rover. Hence the Jag love-in. And while hotels are often loath to divulge the identities of their guests, I know it’s very popular with cricketers because I once attended an event here with the entire Indian cricket team and which was compered by Lords-regular Jeffrey Archer. I earwigged a silver fox discussing his ardour for Jaguars, butted into the convo, and he introduced himself as David. When I asked him if he was into cricket, he told me his surname was Gower. As for the Jaguar Suite itself, I gather it was where the late chairman Ratan Tata liked to stay, and prime minister Narendra Modi chooses it whenever he’s in London.

The nightly rate for the Jaguar Suite is £6,950. That would buy you a 100,000-mile XJS, which is just as comfortable. However, a hotel suite is unlikely to break down or turn out to have been used in a ram-raid.

The suite is also meant to come with a chauffeur-driven Jaguar XJ, but that’s no longer so. The XJ had its life-support pulled in 2019. Now you have to make do with a Land Rover. — Adam Hay-Nicholls

Grenadier by name, potentially Grenadier by nature

There is perhaps a certain irony that the car that was built as a rebuttal to the discontinuation of the original Land Rover Defender could soon be the one to replace the Defender as the vehicle of choice for the British Army.

Ironic it may be, but irony be damned: Ineos and the Grenadier are trying.

It was announced yesterday that Ineos Automotive had joined forces with SMT Defence and NMS UK to form Team Grenadier, an industrial collaboration dedicated to delivering a range of vehicles for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) based on the Grenadier platform.

The vehicle will be designed to operate for the Light Mobility Vehicle (LMV) requirement, which will seek to replace the Army’s 7,000 Land Rovers and Pinzgauer vehicles by 2030. As well as Team Grenadier, other firms looking to supply vehicles to the MoD for LMV (apologies for the acronyms, but it’s the Army and they love them) include the Portsmouth Aviation Hercules, Rheinmetall’s Caracal G-Class, and the Kia Tasman, among others.

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Ineos’s offering is based on the firm’s Multi-Role Light Vehicle, which has already seen service with fire, police and rescue services across the world. Another Grenadier configuration, the Quartermaster, was recently appointed as the emergency services vehicle supplier of choice by the Automobile Club of Monaco, and was unveiled at the recent Monaco Grand Prix.

The collaboration is an all British affair, with SMT Defence bringing a ‘specialist expertise in the design, integration and delivery of bespoke and mission-critical vehicles for elite and specialist military users’ and NMS UK underpinning ‘the collaboration with established UK-based military vehicle production, integration and in-life support’.

‘A defining advantage of the industrial collaboration is its British ownership, onshore assembly and local supply chain,’ says Mike Whittington, chief commercial officer at Ineos Automotive. ‘It brings strategic benefits in operational independence and resilience with security and regulatory alignment — delivering on the MoD’s core objectives. Grenadier’s unrivalled capability and inherent strength provide an obvious starting point for mission-critical transport.

Wetting your whistle at the Silverstone Grand Prix

Fresh from making an appearance at Monaco on board SKANDL’s Formula 1 yacht party, The Curatist rum from Jiggy Rawal will be heading to Northamptonshire at the Pop-Up Hotel for the Silverstone Grand Prix.

The Curatist begins its life as an English rum distilled from green sugar cane and rich molasses, before being married to rare 25-year-old Panamanian rums and finished for six months in cognac casks. It will be served to guests either neat or in a Strawberry Apex, a signature serve created specifically for the Formula 1 season. The Lychee Cucumber Straight rounds out the starting grid. ‘Formula 1 attracts people who understand what it means to do something properly,’ adds Rawal. ‘That’s exactly who The Curatist is for.’