The sale of the £20 million Bletchingdon Park, Oxfordshire
Bletchingdon Park House in Oxfordshire is one of those classic Palladian villas that would make the perfect setting for a period drama. Unlike vast Jacobean mansions like Highclere Castle, better known as Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey, however, Bletchingdon is of a far more manageable size.
The facade of Bletchingdon Park, Bletchingdon, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, OX5 3DWThe staircase hallA formal reception roomThe grounds of Bletchingdon Park
This Grade II* listed Georgian house, built for Lord Valentina in 1782, may be some 24,600 square foot in size, but it has a layout that makes it both practical for living and suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. The accommodation, which has been renovated by the renowned building company Symm, includes 9 bedrooms and suites, well-proportioned formal reception rooms and a garden floor with further reception rooms, a billiards room and a fitness room with spa.
Whilst the original stable block has been sold off and converted to residential accommodation, Bletchingdon Park includes 2 staff flats, a 2-bedroomed lodge cottage and a further 3-bedroomed cottage. With parkland and grounds extending to 127 acres, maintaining Bletchingdon’s plot is large, but easily maintained.
Dr Michael Peagram with Albert II, Prince of Monaco and Prince Andrew, The Duke of YorkThe former stables of Bletchingdon Park were sold off some years ago and have been converted into a number of homes
In the 20th century Bletchingdon was owned by Lord Astor and then Lord Rotherwick. The current owner, Dr Michael Peagram, purchased the estate in 1993. Peagram made his fortune in the chemicals industry after having led a management buyout of Huddersfield based Holliday Chemicals Holdings (HCH) in 1987. He revitalised the business, expanded into new markets and floated the company in 1993. The business was ultimately sold to Yule Catto for £225 million in 1997 and in 2001 Peagram sold another company for a reported £44 million.
At this point, this scientist turned tycoon moved to Monaco and saved himself, according to a 2009 Daily Mail article by Piers Morgan, some £13 million in capital gains tax. A wise businessman and a supporter of David Cameron, Peagram’s modus operandi is:
“Winning with honour and playing by the rules… And not cheating.”
In an interview with Monaco’s NeXt Generation Entrepreneur Forum, he states that he “did lots of work” to achieve his success but admits to “being a romantic at heart.” He has used much of his fortune to fund the philanthropic activities of Outward Bound Monaco with Prince Andrew, The Duke of York and Albert II, Prince of Moanco.
Peagram placed Bletchingdon Park on the market in May 2012 at a price of £20 million. Of why it hasn’t sold, one blogger commented that a footpath runs close to the house and that there is a lack of leisure facilities and outbuildings. Somehow neither seem insurmountable and whoever purchases this fine residence will be a very lucky man. If I were Dr Peagram, though, I’d keep it.
Bletchingdon Park, Bletchingdon, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, OX5 3DW is for sale through Knight Frank. For further details contact Damian Gray on +44 (0) 20 7629 8171 and to download a brochure go to: http://search.knightfrank.com/cho090098
All of us who drive have made stupid mistakes but most of us, at worst, have knocked over a gatepost or pranged a door in a supermarket car park.
Our picture of the week: Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow on the roof of their Range Rover
A couple named Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, however, take the biscuit. This idiotic pair of millionaires, who are best known for having had five children by a surrogate and for having run a business into liquidation, somehow thought they could drive through a flooded ford in their Range Rover Sport in the early hours of the morning without incident.
The pair, who’d spent the day filming at a most naff sounding event named Essex Fashion Week with the “stars” of The Only Way is Essex, claimed that their vehicle spun around three times before starting to fill up with water. Barrie Drewitt-Barlow told the Mail Online:
“It went dark. We had to climb out of the window. I thought I was going to die.”
Plainly terrified of getting his “tuxedo” wet, Tony Drewitt-Barlow called the emergency services from the roof and supposedly, with the help of a police helicopter, an inflatable boat and fifteen firefighters, the couple were rescued an hour later.
A boat rescues the pair from the roof of their Range Rover SportThe car remained in the water on the following dayTony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow pictured outside Southwark Crown Court last year
Now, instead of issuing an apology for the havoc their recklessness caused, the Drewitt-Barlows’ are bleating:
“Tony is suffering from shock and hypothermia at the moment from having over an hour on the roof,” stated Barrie Drewitt-Barlow before he added:
“We went back yesterday to rescue some personal belongings from the boot, a couple of photo albums, clothes, and my laptop, but they had all been stolen. My laptop had all of our photos on. We have put a £5,000 reward up for the return of the photos and laptop.”
Maybe their possessions floated away. They must have left the windows open when they exited the vehicle and if the car really did fill with water, the computer and photo albums would be ruined anyway. Either way, whether stolen or not, the lack of gratitude of this couple showed towards their rescuers makes them utterly contemptible. After all, how much did this ridiculous episode cost?
One comment left on the Mail Online described the Drewitt-Barlow’s as a pair of “pillocks in a puddle.” We agree and simply had to make the image of this ludicrous couple’s foolishness The Steeple Times picture of the week.
The case of a Ferrari FF driver with more money than sense
Last November, on my way to a lunch at The Stafford Hotel with The Steeple Times restaurant critic, Anthony Brown, I took a photograph of one of my favourite vehicles, a Ferrari FF, in Curzon Street, W1.
Emblazoned with a Westminster City Council parking ticket, this particular FF, baring an Arabic registration “66 C,” was especially noticeable as it was “wrapped” in orange and black and I took a photograph of it.
My photograph of the orange-black “wrapped” Ferrari FF in Curzon Street, Mayfair, London, W1 in November 2011
After sharing the image on Facebook, I received, in Margaret Thatcher style fashion, the following reply from the renowned designer, Bruce Oldfield: “No, no, no!” Another friend, Anne Marie Legault added: “It doesn’t fit with the neighborhood.” Karen Ashworth, a Mercedes SL 500 driver and friend from my school days, summed up the thoughts of the majority though when she stated of the car: “I’m not a fan to be honest!”
I subsequently saw the car a few times in the months that followed but never imagined that I’d see it on the Mail Online website and would certainly never have predicted that it would have ended up as an advert against uninsured drivers outside New Scotland Yard.
The very same Ferrari FF outside New Scotland Yard todayInstead of a parking ticket, this Ferrari FF now has a police notice glued to it’s windscreen28-year old His Highness Sheikh Rashid Bin Humaid Al Nuaimi. His nickname is “RRR,” which supposedly stands for “rich in real estate resources.”
The Steeple Times picture of the week, following on from this morning’s coverage of it, therefore, has to be of this particular FF. It turns out that it is owned by His Highness Sheikh Rashid Bin Humaid Al Nuaimi, the 28-year old son of His Highness Sheikh Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, the ruler of Ajman, and was recently impounded in South Kensington, London after he hadn’t bothered to insure it. Having paid £227,000 for such a magnificent vehicle, one would have thought he’d have the brains and finances to have done such. Plainly the age of excess and stupidity is still with us.
He founded Odey Asset Management in 1991 and now manages some $6.2 billion of assets. This graduate of Christ Church, Oxford was first married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Prudence, but after divorcing her Odey formed a union with a fellow financier, Nichola Pease. The couple, termed “The City’s Posh and Becks,” live between Chelsea and Gloucestershire. They hit the press in September 2012 when they applied for planning permission to build a “rather grandiose” hen house, costing some £150,000, in the grounds of their Grade II listed mansion, Eastbach Court.
The deportation of Abu Hamza and the story of Hassan Butt
It’s taken far too long but thankfully the day of Abu Hamza al-Masri’s deportation has arrived. This evil one-eyed Egyptian-born Sunni preacher, best known for his hateful views and involvement in terrorism, has been in prison in Britain since 2004 and is now finally to be extradited to America to face terrorism charges.
Abu Hamza al-MasriHassan Butt when he appeared on the American CBS television magazine news show “60 Minutes”
My only experience of such people involved meeting a young man named Hassan Butt in 2008. Butt, known in the Muslim community as the Al Qaeda supergrass,” was allegedly a former recruiter for the organisation. I met with him after he wrote an article for the Daily Mail in which he stated:
“My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror… My pleas to fellow Christians: you must renounce racism.”
These words came from a man, born in 1980, who had previously said of Britain:
“I feel absolutely nothing for this country. I have no problem with the British people… but if someone attacks them, I have no problem with that either.”
These words came from the very mouth of a man who had been a member of the now banned radical Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun. Butt claimed to have taken tea with Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, recruited upto 200 people to undergo jihadist training in Pakistan and raised between £7,000 and £9,000 a month towards the “cause.” Here was someone who had concluded that:
“I would agree to being called a radical and one day I may even be called a terrorist, if Allah permits me. That is something it would be an honour to be called.”
On the day Butt’s “Damascene conversion” article was printed I was working with an American billionaire vodka tycoon on his various projects in the UK. The man concerned came to London on a periodic basis and always began his day by scouring his favourite right-wing paper for whatever took his fancy. If there were something or someone he liked the look of in it, he’d yell across the room: “Get ‘em round.” More often than not, when I made the call, such people would turn up as many sought funding for their projects. Few of them ever got whatever they were after as this individual was especially careful with his dollars.
On reading Butt’s article, which I admit I also found well written, the Jewish billionaire was thoroughly impressed. He said: “I like the sound of this guy. Get him round.” At the end of the article was a Gmail address so reluctantly, imagining that no doubt MI5 would begin monitoring my own account, I sent off a message. Within minutes, Mr Butt was on the phone.
Butt told me that he’d be in London in the following days to appear on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman so I invited him to lunch. On the day in question, an extremely well presented 27-year old appeared in a brand new £50,000 Audi Q7. After he’d parked, I said: “That’s a nice car.” His response: “The BBC have loaned it to me.” I was perplexed and thought this unlikely, but let it go.
I introduced Mr Butt to the vodka tycoon and for the next hour, the Muslim and the Jew chatted about the differences and similarities between their religions and ways of life. The utterly charming Butt wanted the billionaire, who happened to own a publishing house, to pay for and print his autobiography. The aggressive billionaire had another agenda. His vision of how to unite the religions was to produce a leaflet. He ranted: “It’ll begin thus: ‘If I want to worship a tree, I’ll worship a tree’.” An impasse was reached.
Over lunch at Choy’s on the Kings Road, the conversation continued hopelessly in the same vein. When it was over and as Butt drove away in the Q7, all I could think of was that the security services would most probably now begin monitoring our business activities.
That night, Butt appeared on Newsnight and beat off all of Jeremy Paxman’s attacks. I suppose all who recruit for terror organisations are probably charm personified but Butt most definitely showed his utter brilliance of mind when put up against the media’s finest.
Butt’s strategy worked as he was subsequently invited by the then Minister of State for Security, Counter-terrorism, Crime and Policing, Tony McNulty, to advise them on how to stop young Muslims being “radicalised.” Butt, whom a government source described as having “understood the terrorist mindset perfectly,” had managed to get to the heart of the British government.
The next move of this man, who was arrested but released without charge on five counter-terrorism charges between 2002 and 2008, was to claim that Greater Manchester Police were harassing him. Many of his allegations, though, were illustrated to be pure fantasy in the transcripts of interviews held with them:
“I actually arranged myself to be stabbed in the shoulder, sorry in my arm and in my back because I knew if I said I had been attacked Shiv ([Malik] a freelance journalist and co-author of Butt’s autobiography, Leaving Al Qaeda: Inside The Life And Mind of A British Jihadist) was going to ask for some proof so basically I stabbed myself… you know it was just part of the whole scam.”
I do not know what has become of Butt now but the last reports of him I have been able to find were published in the Daily Mail in July 2009. Here, the paper reports that he “hurled an onslaught of race abuse at police” during an argument over where his Audi Q7 was parked. How odd that that vehicle, supposedly loaned by the BBC, had surfaced again but equally strange was that this educated man was accused of shouting such things as: “Do you like feeling Pakis up?” and calling police “Gestapo,” “bald dogs” and “members of the BNP.” This portrayal was most certainly at odds with the Butt that I met, but plainly he was the Jekyll and Hyde of Al Qaeda.
Whilst my encounter with the pseudo-terrorist Butt was almost certainly with a young man of fantasist tendencies, Abu Hamza truly is a preacher of hate and a force for evil. This hook-armed “terrorist facilitator with a global reach” claimed tens of thousands in benefits in Britain yet also incited others to blow up our citizens. He solicited murder and stirred up racial hatred yet happily ran up legal costs at this nation’s expense. As such, Abu Hamza’s downfall is very much welcomed and his deportation from the British Isles will be celebrated not just by Her Majesty the Queen but indeed by the whole nation.
Watch a Channel 4 News video clip featuring Hassan Butt at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t3uw2nZ7kY
After a mixed response to our last picture of the week, taken from the Mail Online and featuring a “whingeing Brit” pensioner named Pamela Burbery, today we have chosen a more positive image from the very same title.
This week’s image is of another typically British sight, a white van. “White Van Man – The scourge of the road” was a description van drivers were christened with in 1997 by Jonathan Leake, the then transport editor of The Sunday Times, who described them as “the most feared driver on the road.”
The white VW van left on a roundabout in County Durham
White Van Man has never been considered a particularly sensitive chap but his image may have changed this week when the Mail Online featured an image of a VW van left on the George Reynolds Industrial Estate in County Durham decorated with the following:
Linda I’m sorry
I’m a fool and an idiot sometimes.
I love you with all my heart!
Please come home and put this right
We miss you!! I miss us.
I want to grow old with you.
Will you marry me?
Here is a White Van Man with a heart but even with their resources, the Mail Online did not manage to find out the identity of the driver prior to publication.
We very much hope Linda and her mystery man are reunited.
The Steeple Times picture of the week has to be of Pamela Burbery, a pensioner from Birmingham.
Pamela Burbery puts on her best face
Photographed for an article in the Daily Mail, this 76-year old told of how she feels like she’s “under siege” after a school was built at the end of her garden.
In typical whingeing Brit mode, Burbery stated:
“I’ve worked it out that I won’t even be able to make a cup of tea without being watched… My home will be like a goldfish bowl with nowhere to hide… I haven’t been in my garden for 12 months and it’s not going to change now.”
Deborah Carpenter, Burbery’s daughter, had to chip in as well:
“We’re just nothing to the council, it’s a joke how people can be treated like this. They just sit there shrugging their shoulders. It’s absolutely disgusting what can be done to a 76-year-old woman. The council should have bought my mum’s house under a compulsory purchase order.”
Who do this pair think they are? When soldiers are dying in Afghanistan and countries verge on bankruptcy, could the Daily Mail not have found something more worthy to write about? It plainly was a bad news day but the tortured face of this moaning old bag was just too good not to share.
Author and journalist Kate Mulvey is an expert on fashion, emotional intelligence and lifestyle. Mulvey’s article about how people reacted to her travelling around London in a pair of pyjamas is the stuff of legends and she is also the co-author of Decades of Beauty, Key Moments in Fashion; Defining Moments in Art and Vintage Fashion. This dynamo’s favourite haunts number the library of the V&A and the Chelsea Arts Club.
She called the Olympic women’s road race winner, Marianne Vos: “Some bitch from Holland” and won the Stonewall Bigot of the Year Award after mocking Stephen Gately’s death in 2009. Her poisonous pen was utilised again in August 2012 when she attacked both Anthea Turner and Eva Rausing in the same article. This mouth of the south should be sent to Siberia.
She called the Conservative Party the “Nasty Party” in a speech in 2002 and now Theresa May makes for a pretty nasty Prime Minister herself. Gaffe prone May failed to appeal to the police in May 2012 when they heckled her at the Police Federation conference and was too busy hosting a party with Lady Meyer later that month to deal with problems at Britain’s borders. Ken Clarke once described her as “childlike”, Joan Collins has made a fool of her on Twitter and it is for dressing like Worzel Gummidge that this hectoring vicar’s daughter is known best. Please, someone, just shoe her out.
