Matthew Steeples takes a look at a £36 million Kensington mansion formerly owned by disgraced business tycoons Alan Bond and Lord Black; its former chatelaine was known for stating “I have an extravagance that know no bounds”
Sir Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames once described the buccaneering businessman and media tycoon Lord Black of Crossharbour as “London’s biggest bore unhung” whilst his wife, Lady Black – better known as the author and journalist Barbara Amiel – was suggested to be just a “rich bitch” by Sarah Sands in a “case for the defence” article in the Independent in October 2006.
“Poster boy for the 80s” turned fraudster and jailbird Alan Bond (1938 – 2015) was an English-Australian businessman equally Marmite-like in being liked or loathed and now a Kensington mansion owned for a time by both subsequently disgraced businessmen is once again for sale.
14 Cottesmore Gardens, formerly known as 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens, was purchased by Alan Bond’s Satellite Group for £7 million in the 1980s and sold by administrators of that business to Conrad Black and his wife for the knockdown sum of just £3.5 million in 1992.
Plain old Mr and Mrs Black (as they then were) lavished further millions – some of which came from the company Hollinger International, Inc., which ultimately resulted in their downfall – on the double fronted 19th century mansion and used it for entertaining on a lavish scale. Guests, including the likes of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, Joan Collins, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Goldsmith, James Hanson, Arnold Weinstock, Jacob Rothschild, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair, were said to flock to the parties they gave there, but in 2005 these gatherings of upto 400 people at a time came to an almighty end.
Forced to sell at a bargain basement price of just £13.1 million on an ask of £17.5 million as the Canadian born billionaire faced jail time in America, Lord and Lady Black’s tenure was over and the residence saw its “arriviste torch” passed to Juan and Adriana Villalonga, a couple described as “a Mexican telecom czar and his beauty-queen wife.” Of what came next, The Globe And Mail’s Paul Waldie pointedly penned in February 2007: “[They] quickly erased many of the features that the Blacks prized.”
Once again for sale as of April 2023, the value of 14 Cottesmore Gardens has again been deemed to have substantially risen. Knight Frank offer the 12,310 square foot, five-storey residence at a punchy price of £36 million and laud it as “imposing” and “presented in good order throughout.” They add that a “pre-planning consultation” has found that further accommodation could be added that would take the internal space to more than 15,000 square feet; business barons with deep pockets only need apply.
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.
Pictured Top – 54-foot wide 14 Cottesmore Gardens is described by selling agents Knight Frank as “offering lateral living so often requested but so hard to find in central London.” They neglect to mention that with its hedges cut back to the minimum, the place actually looks extremely forlorn.
Flamboyant Lord and Lady Black dressed as Cardinal Richelieu and Marie Antoinette for a party at Kensington Palace in 2000. For a time, the couple employed 17 butlers (if Tom Bower is to be believed) and had two private jets and homes – aside from the 19th Cottesmore Gardens mansion – in New York, Palm Beach and Toronto. “Guests packed into their parties at Cottesmore Gardens,” Bower remarked in his 2006 book the couple, adding: “Amiel was a big spender… Under the control of senior butler Andrew Lightwood, second butler Peter Wilson and a succession of third butlers, Amiel’s life in Kensington had become what her constantly changing staff called ‘bizarre.’ Each recruit was taken by Lightwood on an introductory tour of the house, ending on the roof. ‘Make sure the landing lights are on at all times,’ instructed Lightwood solemnly, ‘because Madame takes off from here on her broomstick looking for cats. She needs the lights to guide her return.’ His face would crack into a smile. ‘Most important, take care that she never sees you. She hates seeing any of us.’ Amiel’s eccentricity demanded that her staff hid whenever she approached, diving into cupboards if necessary, and never entered her quarters when she was present. Every day, all the bed linen was changed and subjected to ‘the penny test.’ A coin was dropped onto the sheets. If it failed to bounce they were not drawn sufficiently tight. Every cushion was arranged to a precise pre-ordained position, and each towel placed exactly as Amiel had predetermined. ‘Andrew!’ she screamed down the telephone on one memorable occasion, ‘the towels are in the wrong place!’ Lightwood, as Amiel knew, was in New York, but he was expected to telephone the staff in the house in London to rectify the error. ‘You f**king pillock!’ she yelled at another member of staff for reading her ‘Daily Mail’ before it was delivered to her.”Barbara Amiel Black (or ‘Lady Black’ as she prefers to be known) in her drawing room at Cottesmore Gardens (pictured). Of her, Sarah Sands on Lord and Lady Black in the ‘Independent’ in October 2006 opined: “Conrad and Barbara in their monstrous, glamorous way, knew how to throw parties. The talk was of geo-politics and hemlines. Nowadays, we scorn their extravagance and doubt the source of their wealth with prune-faced hindsight. Meanwhile, everyone is sucking up to Russians…. Barbara would disingenuously begin her midnight calls to me by saying in her low, breathy voice: ‘I hope I am not disturbing you.’ She would then offer little glimpses of her own home life. I remember her mentioning that Conrad Black was upstairs playing with his fleet of toy gun ships in the bath… I remember her examining an exhibition of doll’s houses at the Chelsea Flower Show and sighing how restful it would be to live in this cosy little home. How she envied people in small houses. The burden of wealth was one of her more dangerous fantasies. At one of her Gatsby-style parties in Kensington, she flinched at the elaborate canapés on offer: ‘Really, all I want is a sausage,’ she said, piteously. Then, she ran a hand down her inconceivably expensive dress and whispered: ‘I hate these parties, I am so shy.’ Later, I was invited to her boudoir, where she lay on cushion surrounded by her women friends. She was Kensington’s Cleopatra, surrounded by maidens such as the designer and Forte daughter Olga Polizzi, the political thinker Tessa Keswick and the writer Miriam Gross.”The very same drawing room at 14 Cottesmore Gardens today. The décor is now somewhat more modern and less ‘classical country house-ified.’ It’s certainly more Soho Farmhouse than Alberto Pinto in style; it is currently a space that the former Meghan Markle would feel more at home than say, perhaps, the likes of Lord and Lady Black’s chum Ghislaine Maxwell and her fellow noxious nonce Ponzi scheming paedophile boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein. Mr Pinto was responsible, it should be noted, for the designs of most of Epstein’s residences.The front elevation of 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens during the era it was owned by Lord and Lady Black.Multiple entries for Lord and Lady Black during the time they owned 14 Cottesmore Gardens appeared in the ‘Little Black Book’ address book often attributed as being that of the friends and associates of Jeffrey Epstein, but that featured more of the contacts of Ghislaine Maxwell in fact. In October 2020, Barbara Amiel took revenge on the pension pot plunderer’s padeophile sex trafficker daughter by featuring her in her “score-settling” memoir ‘Friends & Enemies: A Life in Vogue, Prison, & Park Avenue.” Maxwell had “dumped” Lady Black when Lord Black was being investigated for fraud. She wrote of their last meeting: “We were friends – so putting on my ‘So good to see you’ face, I headed for her. She bolted. Turned that sharp tight little turn when you really want to get away. And that was it.” Of the clear lover of plastic surgery Lady Black, in October 2020, Sarah Sands remarked in ‘The Mail on Sunday’: “She had a bohemian, almost masculine, view of opportunistic sex. She describes, for instance, accompanying an early love in his white Triumph sports car ‘in which once or twice I had performed fellatio to the fascination of passing truck drivers, all for fun.’”After getting out of the clink in 2012, Lord and Lady Black decided to go back on the ‘razzle-dazzle’ and posed for photographers before heading back to London to party with friends. In May 2019, the rambunctious peer arrogantly announced he’d be returning to the House of Lords after President Donald Trump pardoned and praised him. Commenting, of this pardon, Lord Black declared: “I’m not bitter… Officially in the United States, I’ve never been charged and I won in the end. It was a war and there are casualties in wars. I lost the time, I lost a lot of money, but as you can see my standards of living isn’t bad… The truth is, these, last 15 years, I haven’t been as interested in British politics as I was before – in the Thatcher years. It could be quite interesting again, in fact it is as of right now – it’s very interesting… It’s my good fortune that at a time when it is feasible, it happens – by happy coincidence – that it is a time of great fermentation in British public affairs.” Surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to have turned up on occasions since.The previous owner of 14 Cottesmore Gardens, Alan Bond (1938 – 2015), will forever be remembered as “Australia’s most notorious corporate criminal.” Born in Hammersmith, London, Bond’s first crime occurred when he was charged with theft aged 14 in Fremantle in Australia and whilst he is remembered for bankrolling the successful challenge for the 1983 America’s Cup, it is for causing the then biggest corporate collapse in Australian history that he will be go down in history. Former Miss Mexico Adriana Abascal López-Cisneros (at the time Adriana Villalonga) bought the house in 2005. She divorced the Spanish businessman Juan Villalonga in 2009 and married the French businessman Emmanuel Schreder in Ibiza in June 2013. In August 2014, the magazine ‘Quién’ featured the model and television presenter on its cover and at that time she described her new husband as “the love of my life.”Madrid born Juan Villalonga became the joint owner of 14 Cottesmore Gardens with his then wife Adriana Abascal – the couple were married between 2000 and 2009 – in 2005. He is listed on Companies House as being a director of the now dissolved Medikidz Foundation at the address between August 2009 and November 2013. Married since 2011 to a photographer named Vanessa Von Zitewitz, Mr Villalonga was a partner at McKinsey & Company in the 1980s, CEO for Credit Suisse First Boston and Bankers Trust in Spain in the early 1990s and CEO of Telefónica from 1996 to 2000. He was named as one of the best performing chief executive officers in the world by ‘Harvard Business Review’ in 2010 and is also linked to addresses in Monaco.
The Names & Numbers – 14 Cottesmore Gardens (formerly known as ’12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens’), Kensington, London, W8 5PR, United Kingdom
April 2023 – Offered for sale for £36 million ($44.4 million, €40.9 million or درهم163.2 million) through Knight Frank. Valued on Homipi at an upper sum of £28.558 million ($35.250 million, €32.440 million or درهم129.456 million).
2009 – Mr and Mrs Villalonga divorce and subsequently Adriana Abascal married Emmanuel Schreder, a French businessman, in Ibiza in June 2013.
2005 – Sold by Lord and Lady Black for £13.1 million ($16.2 million, €14.9 million or درهم59.4 million) to Spanish businessman Juan Villalonga Navarro and Mexican model, Miss Mexico winner and television presenter Adriana Abascal López-Cisneros Villalonga.
October 2004 – Placed for sale for £17.5 million ($21.6 million, €19.9 million or درهم79.3 million) according to NZ Herald.
January 2004 – Valued at £14 million ($17.3 million, €15.9 million or درهم63.5 million) according to The Globe And Mail. At the time, the “mansion” in “the upscale Kensington neighbourhood” was described as having “10 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms and a swimming pool.”
Featured also in The Guardian in an article by Chris Tryhorn. Quoting Lord Black, he shared: “At a certain price, anything is for sale. [It has] been shown to people in the not-too-distant-past.”
Going further, Tryhorn added: “Artwork from the 18th and 19th centuries lines the walls, and there is plenty of storage space for the extensive wardrobe and shoe collection of Lord Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, who famously declared once that her ‘extravagence knows no bounds.’ … It was originally two homes and one of the two original front doors is now a ‘deliveries’ entrance. He has used it in the past to host dinners with butler and maid service that was part-paid by Hollinger.”
Also in 2004, in a profile in The Spectator, Peter Oborne wrote:
“Every year the Blacks threw two parties, one at Christmas and one summer event, at their double-fronted 11-bedroom mansion in Cottesmore Gardens. Everybody who mattered at the time went: Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Goldsmith, James Hanson, Arnold Weinstock, Jacob Rothschild, royalty, the playwright Tom Stoppard.”
“Some of these, injudiciously as it turned out, agreed to join the main Hollinger board. The luckier ones – Peter Carrington, Robert Salisbury – got away with being made directors of TheTelegraph. As the Tories faded out, Labour ministers started to arrive, the indefatigable Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett and other ministers eager to ingratiate themselves with the Tory press. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were assiduous in attendance. In London, the Nineties belonged to the Blacks. They were London’s most glamorous power couple.”
“There had been a time when both Blacks had kept their feet on the ground. This ceased to be the case. One evening Barbara Black rang Charles Moore panic-stricken from her Kensington home. There had been a last-minute drop-out from one of the famous Black dinner parties. ‘I’m short of a woman,’ she told Moore. Moore surveyed the newsroom. His gaze alighted on the journalist Eleanor Mills, by chance the stepdaughter of the Cabinet minister Tessa Jowell.”
“An hour later, hastily groomed, made-up and brushed, Mills was sipping pre-dinner drinks in Cottesmore Gardens. Then disaster struck. A male guest, Max Fisher, dropped out. Mills was approached by Conrad Black. ‘Finish your drink and skedaddle,’ he told her. Barbara Black then told her to go to the kitchen and out through the servants’ door, where the driver would pick her up and take her home.”
2001 – Conrad Black is elevated to a life peerage in the United Kingdom at the suggestion of Tony Blair. He sat on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords until 2007 as The Right Honourable The Lord Black of Crossharbour KCSG, but took a “leave of absence” between 2012 and 2019.
28th May 1996 – The Royal Borough of Kensington And Chelsea ordered that 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens “shall be known and described” simply instead as 14 Cottesmore Gardens.
Mid 1990s – The Blacks set about renovating 12 and 14 Cottesmore Gardens with the help of J. E. Evans Associates. Of the work in October 2006, The Sunday Times shared a segment of Tom Bower’s 2006 hatchet job Conrad and Lady Black that read: “Amiel vowed to create a palace that would attract celebrity worshipers of a power couple. Part of the first floor was to be removed to create a huge ground floor reception area.”
1992 – 12 and 14 Cottesmore Gardens sold by the administrators of the affairs of Alan Bond through estate agents Savills to media tycoon Conrad Black and his Watford born journalist wife Barbara Amiel Black for “well under the asking price” for a sum of £3.5 million ($4.3 million, €4 million or درهم15.9 million).
Mr Bond had been granted mortgages valued at £16.2 million ($20 million, €18.4 million or درهم73.5 million) on the property by Bell Satellite Services on the property along with two others at 4 and 16 Belgrave Mews in London, SW1 previously according to a report published by Financial Review in March 1990.
1991 – Rented to an American businessman for £6,000 per week ($7,400, €6,800 or درهم27,200 per week).
1990 – Placed in the hands of administrators of Mr Bond’s and placed for sale through Savills for a bargain basement sum of £3.8 million ($4.7 million, €4.3 million or درهم17.2 million) according to Financial Review.
1980s – Sold to Alan Bond’s Bell Satellite Group for £7 million ($8.6 million, €8 million or درهم31.7 million).
Circa 1905 – Walter Tapper is said to have “designed a library with handsome Arts and Crafts plasterwork (now removed) at the rear of the building.”
1869 – In their current marketing blurb, Knight Frank suggest: “There has been a house on the site of 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens since at least 1869. The current house has been altered, extended and most notably joined over the subsequent century and a half. With the local planning department strongly opposed to further amalgamation of homes, opportunities to acquire a house of this width will be rarer still in the future.”
1850s to 1860s – Built “under the direction of David Howell, of Serjeants Inn, Fleet Street.” Mr Howell was described in 1853 as an “articled clerk to a solicitor, lately carrying on business as a solicitor.” The architecture was lauded as: “Designed in a bold classical manner, with rather fleshy consoles and modillions… and bands of Vitruvian scroll between the bases of the ground-floor windows.”
More photographs of the £36 million mansion…
An entrance hall where power and privilege have most certainly mingled previously.The 54-foot wide drawing is lauded by selling realtors Knight Frank as “arguably the best room in the house” and “double aspect.” They add: “[It has] six windows overlooking the street and additional views over the private garden to the rear.”The columns where Barbara Amiel Black once posed for photographs remain, but the subsequent owners eliminated much of the 1990s ‘brash’ that had been installed by a Watford born woman whose excess clearly offended so many.This dining room, where Conrad Black hosted presidents and prime ministers, is now somewhat diminished. The table for eight looks completely out of place and a future owner would do well to install something a little grander.A double height entertaining space was installed at the insistence of the loftier-than-lofty Lady Black in the 1990s and it remains today. However, it is now currently being used for more casual affairs such as Netflix viewing rather than being the scene of something that you’d more likely find in the ‘House of Cards’ in fact.A new owner might reinstate the grandeur of the past; sadly, however, this seems unlikely and the purchaser is more likely to be a footballer or Internet tycoon than a super-connected business tycoon.This currently very dark and very depressing study would most certainly not appeal to the very clearly very, very bright yet very, very pompous The Right Honourable The Lord Black of Crossharbour KCSG – a man who is said to count Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte as “his military heroes.” Of him in July 1997, Mark Honigsbaum in the ‘Independent’ remarked: “Although Black’s grandfather had briefly been a business partner of Harold Harmsworth, the original Viscount Rothermere, it was from his father, George Montegu Black Jr, that Black learned the art of corporate warfare, the importance of historical perspective and that gambling provides a disappointing rate of return compared to the Dow Jones index… The young Conrad was precocious. At the age of eight he sank his life savings of $60 into a single share of General Motors. He also became obsessed with Napoleon, and would astound his father’s friends by reeling off details of campaigns. Another story has him washing dollar bills and hanging them out to dry on a line outside his father’s home in Toronto. The last is apocryphal – Black says he slipped in the mud and was cleaning his change – but the image of the young capitalist, wise beyond his years, is accurate. His childhood tutor, the historian Laurier LaPierre, once asked Black why he always seemed to have the air of someone waiting for something to happen… A few years ago, for instance, the rumour went round Fleet Street that Black had bought Napoleon’s preserved penis at an auction. Black denied it, but many remain convinced that Bonaparte’s body part sits in Black’s collection of military curios… Black is no philanderer and is devoted to his second wife, the former ‘Sunday Times’ columnist Barbara Amiel. They are said to be intellectual soul mates and the parties at their four-storey mansion in Kensington are famous for bringing together a cross-section of the great and good.”One could not imagine the likes of the late great Baroness Thatcher, for example, liking the idea of sitting in this extremely depressing and dark waiting area. A new owner would do well to obliterate a décor scheme that could have only been favoured by a completely colour blind banker.A room currently described as a ‘cinema room’ measures 28’6” by 21’6” and is situated at the rear of the house. One can imagine Conrad Black having sat here for hour upon hour watching historical dramas about Napoleon with the likes of chums such as the acclaimed historian Andrew Roberts, the gambling tycoon John Aspinall and the politician and diarist Alan Clark, but a new owner will be more likely next showing episodes of ‘Succession’ – based on ‘The Telegraph’ tycoon’s rival Rupert Murdoch – than viewing historical works one most definitely suspects.Dining whilst the staff cook would NEVER have been on the agenda in the era that pomposity reigned whilst Lady Black was chatelaine of 14 Cottesmore Gardens.A 2,000 square foot entire floor fit for a tycoon… The master bedroom suite of the house takes up the entirety of the second floor of the building. It incorporates not only the principal bedroom, but also a “his” dressing room and a “her” dressing room as well as a sitting area, a bathroom, a shower room and storage rooms. It has direct lift access and is bigger than the average Brit’s entire house.A dressing room in the house where Barbara Black opened up to ‘Vogue’ and displayed “closets overflowing with dazzling evening gowns, designer handbags and 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes. ‘I have an extravagance that knows no bounds,’ she famously declared. Unfortunately for Lady Black, the article was closely perused at investment company Tweedy, Browne, a Hollinger International shareholder.”This playroom certainly did not exist in the era that Lord and Lady Black owned the property. It would be more likely crammed with books or stuffed with Manolo Blahnik shoes than toys from Toys ‘R Us. A new owner may likely reinstate it as an additional bedroom or office or games room perhaps.The pool room measures 43’9” by 26’9” and is no doubt where Lady Black spent many an hour relaxing.The garden to the rear was where Lord and Lady Black hosted their annual summer party (with guests “spilling” into their drawing room also). In surprisingly Tardis-like fashion, the duo were able to supposedly squeeze in upto 400 guests at such occasions. Amongst those said to have enjoyed hospitality there were Joan Collins and of such, magazine publisher Nicholas Coleridge wrote: “If you get a kick out of milling about with present and former prime ministers, cabinet ministers, minor royals, dukes, editors, vastly rich Americans, distinguished historians, gossip columnists, playboys and lots of pretty ‘it’ girls, then this was the place to be.”The existing floor plan of the property illustrates the vast scale of the building offered. A buyer, Knight Frank observe, has additional options and “a pre-planning consultation has been carried out with RBKC by leading architects Studio Indigo.” They add: “[It] would completely reconfigure the house adding an additional basement floor and taking the internal space to more than 15,000 square foot. The resulting house would have a 40-foot by 41-foot south-facing rear garden.”A plan of the site as presented in 1996 when 12 and 14 became known just as 14 Cottesmore Gardens.
Nikolay Kalinin calls out Grant Shapps’ decision to replace ‘GB’ car stickers with ‘UK’ ones as utterly ludicrous
There are so many things that Conservative MPs could focus on right now.
They could work on reviving British business – if they truly care about Brexit – or strengthening links between the different regions in order to prevent them from declaring independence, but instead they decided to instead obsess about car stickers. Yes, you heard it right, car stickers.
Transport secretary Grant Shapps recently announced that production of traditional ‘GB‘ motifs used by British drivers abroad will be discontinued in favour of a legal emblem stating ‘UK.’ Their reasoning? The Daily Mail reports it is being done “as an attempt to win over unionists amid heightened tensions over post-Brexit border checks” and in order to “send a clear message about Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom.” Exactly how the new rule will “win over unionists,” however, was not explained by the minister.
Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger responded to the announcement by stating: “I can’t see the point. It seems to me to be a complete waste of money when we don’t need to be wasting money. It also seems to be a slap in the face for people who are proud to be GB.”
However, another Tory MP told the Mail: “The United Kingdom is stronger because it has the link with Northern Ireland because if you say Great Britain you are excluding Northern Ireland. I think it strengthen the ties at a time when we have got a problem.”
If the transport secretary really cared about “including” Northern Ireland within the country, he would by this point get on with the construction of a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland that Boris Johnson pledged to build a few months ago, which would benefit national trade and establish an easier connection between Northern Ireland and the rest of UK.
Policy like this affirms what many online satirists and journalists have been saying: The Conservatives care about anything but the people they’re supposed to represent. Instead of passing legislation designed to help people, they introduce initiatives that are either pointless, such as One Britain One Nation Day, or do things that make life worse for people, for example by not closing the country in time when the Delta variant began to spread.
COVID has exposed even more how these people absolutely don’t care about the public’s wellbeing, because while Boris Johnson has pledged to remove the rule of compulsory mask-wearing in shops and public transport, a recent poll by YouGov has concluded that 71% of people in England, Wales and Scotland want mask-wearing to be compulsory after July 19th, with 66% saying that the rules should remain in shops and enclosed public spaces.
If you need more evidence, just look at the Conservatives trying to suppress the right to protest with the Policing and Crime Bill, which Labour proposed to amend by introducing a minimum sentence for rape. Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives voted against the amendment. They don’t care about the people who suffered violence in their households during lockdown, because as Labour MP Angela Rayner stated, the Conservatives are “more interested in protecting statues than protecting women.”
The Conservatives need to realise that even though they have a 363-seat majority, that does not grant them immunity from public scrutiny and accountability. They still have a job of representing the people, and it’s about time that they started doing that, instead of passing laws that are unnecessary and pointless.
Pictured top: Aside from being “beguiled” by the e-scooter lobby, as we reported on Sunday, Grant Shapps is now set to inflict his plain personal obsession with ‘UK’ stickers over ‘GB’ stickers on the British public.
Shapps’ decision has been ridiculed on all sides of the political divide. It will not only anger Brexiteers, but also those whose loyalties still are to the European Union.Of the move, Ian Liddell-Grainger MP remarked: “That is a bit bloody rum. I can’t see the point. It seems to me to be a complete waste of money when we don’t need to be wasting money. It also seems to be a slap in the face for people who are proud to be GB. It is a waste of time, a waste of money. I don’t know why we are bothering.” Going further, ‘The Sun’ added: “The AA described the move, which was settled on in May but not announced, leaving them feeling left ‘in the lurch’ as stocks of some 50,000 ‘GB’ motifs are now completely worthless.”
Previous advice, such as shown in this video shared on YouTube in February, is now out of date. Those that don’t follow the new rules, ‘The Sun’ concludes: “It will be a legal requirement to slap the ‘UK’ one on your car, and rule flouters could face fines. These will be down to the individual countries.”
Nikolay Kalinin analyses Laurence Fox’s decision to pull out of the Batley and Spen by-election and suggests this batty man’s days in politics are nearly numbered
As if Labour hasn’t had enough losses this year despite numerous revelations regarding the Conservative government’s utter incompetence, their retention of control over the Batley and Spen constituency is under serious jeopardy.
Fox also mentioned in his statement that a major reason for his decision to withdraw is the events at the Batley Grammar School, where a teacher was suspended and received death threats after showing a cartoon of Muhammed from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which Fox called “a blight on our free, tolerant, fair and democratic society.”
Nevertheless, Fox also mentioned in his statement that he would be inviting both Conservative and Labour candidates to a meeting with the citizens of the constituency “very soon to discuss tolerance in the UK.”
It’s very hard to understand how Reclaim could have split the vote had it stood in the election, but most likely they would have successfully capitalised on the grammar school incident. They would have probably have painted it as an oppression of freedom of speech, thereby convincing more right-wing people to vote and preventing the Conservatives from winning the seat.
One thing we can conclude from this episode however is that Fox is not intending to go anywhere anytime soon. Even though this loony was humiliated by YouTuber Niko Omilana at the recent London mayoral elections, he is showing great determination to make his party successful.
Still, we have to keep in mind that much of the reason why Reclaim is known by many people is because of Fox’s utter insanity and because the very, very wealthy financier Jeremy Hosking is strangely not yet tired of funding his operation. The people will eventually move on to better politicians, and Hosking will realise that his large investments into Fox’s party of clowns has not proved beneficial. All in all, the days of Laurence Fox’s political career are quite deservedly numbered.
Yesterday, seeking yet more attention, 43-year-old Laurence Fox took to Twitter to condemn the England squad as “millionaire woke babies” for taking the knee. He continued by suggesting he hopes England will lose in the first round of the Euros and added: “I’m embarrassed to be British.”
In spite of wasting a huge amount of Jeremy Hosking’s money – said to be upto £5 million – Laurence Fox’s 2021 London mayoral election campaign was an utter disaster. He won 47,634 votes, achieved just 1.9% of the vote and thus effectively spent £104.97 for every vote the Reclaim Party received. As a result, Fox lost his £10,000 deposit paid to London Elects, the Greater London Authority team responsible for organising the election of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly as he failed to achieve the 5% of votes or higher required to retain the deposit. The public, however, may now find themselves in a worse situation – Laurence Fox might return to making awful music condemned as “more Chelsea Travelodge than Chelsea Hotel.” Of it, in January 2020, the ‘Guardian’s’ Michael Hann observed: “Laurence Fox’s music doesn’t sound as if it had to exist. It sounds as if it exists because he had the wherewithal to make it, and because his name meant there would always be people willing to give it a plug. The very definition of privilege, really.”Aside from being the co-founder of Marathon Asset Management, University of Cambridge educated Jeremy Hosking is a shareholder in Crystal Palace F. C. as well as the owner of the Gravetye Manor hotel in Sussex. He previously funded the Conservative Party, Vote Leave and the Brexit Party prior to becoming financially involved with Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party.In September 2020, ‘The Steeple Times’ suggested Laurence Fox had “morphed from a much loved tellybox treasure into a tedious twerp.” In the time since, he’s got even worse.
Nikolay Kalinin asks YouTube star Max Fosh about why he decided to run as a candidate in the 2021 London mayoral elections
Max Fosh is running a campaign to simply get more votes than ‘Detective Sergeant Ignoramus,’ the actor Laurence Fox, in next week’s London mayoral elections.
However, outside of appearances on his YouTube channel, Fosh has not spoken much about his campaign and his rivalry with Fox, so I decided to get to know him better and asked him 10 questions on behalf of The Steeple Times:
NK: Did you intend to run for London Mayor back in 2020 before the pandemic, or was it only after Laurence Fox announced his campaign that you decided to run?
MF: I decided to run when I saw a BBC News article outlining all the potential candidates, and at the bottom it had the different things that one needs to do in order to become a nominee, which was to get 66 signatures from 33 different boroughs – 2 individual signatures per borough – and to raise a £10,000 deposit. That’s what caused me to run, and I decided my main target was Laurence when I realised: ‘Hey, Sadiq’s going to win this election,’ so I wanted to have my own candidate to run against. I saw Lozza – similar background [they both went to school at Harrow], no experience in politics, he’s got 5 million quid and I don’t – and I decided to see who wins.
NK: Do you feel as if people your age and occupation are not taken seriously, especially by politicians?
MF: I think people my age and occupation are taken seriously, especially when they are pulling in numbers that they are. I mean, Niko Omilana has 5% of the vote, and he’s polling high in the 18-25 year old demographic, so I think we are being taken seriously.
NK: What was your reaction when you saw all these articles about you appearing on sites such as Daily Mail and Metro and, of course, in The Steeple Times?
MF: My reaction was of course: ‘Ooh! How interesting!’ Look, I know my media is online, so any information or any article that’s written about me in the mainstream press is always… well, I wouldn’t say it’s a welcome bonus, but it’s there and as long as more people can read the story of Max Fosh and his mayoral run then that can only be a good thing.
NK: In regards to Laurence Fox, what are you doing in order to get more votes than him besides making videos featuring you pranking him? It’s essential to note that you were tied with him in the ITV opinion poll revealed some time ago.
MF: I wouldn’t say I’m pranking him at all. I’m just positioning myself as a candidate. I’m just trying to utilise my audience to go out and vote and I have to preface this – I said this in multiple videos: I don’t want people to vote for me just because it can be fun. I want people to look at all the candidates running and make a formal decision and vote for whom they think is the best Mayor of London.
Would I be the best Mayor of London? Absolutely not. Would Laurence? Absolutely not. I’m just using my audience and the platform to encourage young people to vote.
NK: Will Laurence Fox in your opinion ever reach his political ambitions of first becoming London Mayor and then MP? What will happen to his Reclaim Party?
MF: I do not have the personal political expertise at all to be able to tell you whether he’ll reach his political ambitions. I mean, I’m not sure what his political ambitions really are; in this election, do I think he’s going to become Mayor of London? Absolutely not. In regards to the Reclaim Party, I really could not say, because it’s not my place to say. That’s more of a question for the party.
NK: How are you planning to react if you fail to get more votes than Fox?
MF: I would shake his hand, congratulate him and retire from politics.
NK: If you were legitimately running for position of London Mayor, what policies would you write in your manifesto?
MF: I am legitimately running for the position; I don’t think you could get any more legitimate than putting your name on the ballot paper. If you would like to see my manifesto, it’s all on laurencefox.org.
NK: Would you ever consider creating your own political party?
MF: No, not at all. I very much intend to retire after 6th May from politics altogether – whatever the result (obviously even if I win, which is an infinitesimal chance).
NK: How do you feel about major media outlets such as BBC, ITV and LBC ignoring your campaigns and instead interviewing and organising debates only between candidates from big parties?
MF: I totally agree with them. There are 20 candidates who are running, and four of them are considered the big players who are going to get most of the votes, so I think the big media outlets should be focused on them. It doesn’t mean they should be ignoring other campaigns, and they haven’t. I’ve been featured in every single nominee list, so I don’t really mind.
NK: Finally, do you think that your and Niko Omilana’s attempts to go into politics will start a trend where Internet personalities will try to run for public office?
MF: I don’t think that it will start a trend, because the trend has already happened; look at the US with Donald Trump, look at Ukraine with their President, so I don’t think this is going to kickstart a new trend; it’s already happening.
Flushing Out Fosh – Max Fosh appeared at Laurence Fox’s campaign launch with a car wrapped with the message: “Don’t Believe Everything You See On A Bus.”
Flushing Out Fosh – Max Fosh’s campaign in the 2021 London mayoral election centres around his use of YouTube as a medium to communicate with his clearly vast audience of 18 to 25 year olds.
New contributor Nikolay Kalinan delves into the history of the American ex-heroin addict and wannabe Mayor of London Brian Rose and finds his curious claims to be rather hollow
Several weeks ago, Brian Rose seemed to have it all; his odds of winning the London Mayoral election stood at 18/1 – 2nd place to Sadiq Khan – and he was organising what he called “the largest outdoor campaign in British political history” supported by 2 million subscribers on his ‘London Real’ YouTube channel and 1.6 million followers on his Instagram pages.
Yet, the truth be known: Rose’s image of supposed runaway success is nothing but total fakery. In an opinion poll, only 2% of the respondents said they would vote for Rose, which is actually less than the amount of people who expressed their support for Niko Omilana – someone who doesn’t even have serious election policies apart from the genius pledge to make Boris Johnson “shush.”
For years now, ‘Brian The Piss-Drinker’ has created an image of his being a knight in shining armour, but that hides his utter incompetence and shallowness. Indeed, this was evident back in April 2020 when he conducted an interview with the fruitcake David Icke. During that discussion, Icke claimed that COVID-19 was not real, and was actually spread by 5G towers – no surprises there – with the purpose of creating a fascist world order.
When faced with criticism regarding the Icke interview, which was quite justifiably subsequently removed from YouTube, Rose first responded by stating that he was simply protecting freedom of speech, and then by him re-uploading the interview to his own video service, the Digital Freedom Platform. He then doubled down on the whole controversy by releasing interviews with more nutjobs, including the angry and delusional radio host Alex Jones and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Aside from Rose’s pandering to COVID-sceptics giving a sense of how great a wrong’un he genuinely is, a look at whether he has kept his promises in regards to the Digital Freedom Platform he created illustrates further the deception that surrounds this American ex-heroin using transplant.
Initially, of that, Rose said that the medium would be a new video platform “of the people, by the people and for the people.” Almost a year later, and with some £720,000 raised for the project, you would think that he would do what any “politician of the people” would do and fulfil his promise by officially opening up the platform but, of course, he didn’t.
Instead, Digitial Freedom Platform has been transformed into a library of content for amateur conspiracy theorists and is also being used as another piece of marketing for Rose’s mayoral campaign. So, to recap, Brian Rose spent £720,000 donated to him by ordinary people on creating InfoWars 2.0 and what did they get back? Nothing.
Things don’t get any better when you look at Brian Rose’s election manifesto, which looks like a bunch of regurgitated campaign promises from candidates such as Shaun Bailey and Laurence Fox. Rose has aped such pledges as that by Bailey to put thousands of police officers on London’s streets and build thousands of homes that will cost just £100,000 each, as well as Fox’s pledge to end lockdown and create a festival celebrating London’s culture.
In fact, it just feels as if Rose has copied and pasted whole sections from Bailey and Fox’s manifestos and then replaced some words and numbers with ones of his own. In summary: Here is someone incapable of actually coming up with anything original.
Brian Rose is inevitably heading for doom on May 6th, and the truth – whether he likes it or not – is that it doesn’t matter how much money he spends on campaigning or how much he says that he is a crusader for “freedom of speech.” The reality is clear: Brian Rose won’t become the next Mayor of London because he’s simply nothing other than an utter nutter.
Pictured top: Naughty boy Brian Rose being given a ticking off (and a fine subsequently) for campaigning when and where he shouldn’t have been.
A Rotten Rose – According to an interview he gave to Susannah Butter, published in the ‘Evening Standard’ on the 14th April 2021, plainly delusional “Brian Rose is already referring to himself as the Mayor [of London] and says Londoner’s are too.”
Matthew Steeples argues that Daniel Johnson’s “Come on Carrie: your country needs you!” call to Boris Johnson’s wine chucking latest baby mama is nothing but claptrap
The Article is one of those online titles that one can dip into from time to time and find an array of opinions about politics. It claims to show “the world in all its shades of grey” and though that’s not meant in a ‘John Major style’ (thank the Lord), the publication’s attempts to “see a story from every angle” is indeed refreshing.
Yesterday, however, the title’s editor Daniel Johnson – the brother of the controversial right-wing Vote Leave and anti-lockdown COVID Recovery Group funding former owner of the Pizza Express group Luke Johnson – penned quite frankly the most bizarre article known to man.
Daniel Johnson, also a founding editor of Standpoint and described by the Independent as having “the air of a classics don” and listed on Wikipedia for having “asserted that Islam in not a peaceful religion,” asked: “Why isn’t the Prime Minister calling for a post-Covid catch-up campaign [for British school children]?” He then turned to what he believes should happen in the wake of Prince Philip’s funeral tomorrow.
Bizarrely and from utterly nowhere, the journalist went off on a seriously odd tangent and declared:
“Our sympathy for the Royal Family is all the greater because this has been a sad time for so many others, too. After so many funerals, a wedding would not come amiss. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a divorced man in possession of the good fortune to be Prime Minister must be in want of a wife.”
“Next month Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds will have been engaged for 18 months. Once the restrictions on weddings have been lifted in June, there is nothing to stop them getting married. Not everyone would rejoice, but most people would wish them well. Royal weddings happen regularly; prime ministerial ones are rare birds. Indeed, the last time a Prime Minister tied the knot while in office was in 1822, when Lord Liverpool remarried after being widowed.”
“If a week is a long time in politics, two centuries is an aeon. There are many reasons why Boris might be hesitant, but his fiancée is no shrinking violet and is quite capable of insisting that the time has come. Little Wilfred is growing fast. The nation needs cheering up. Come on, Carrie: your country needs you!”
Aside from the fact that most of the nation would prefer Prime Minister Johnson to be focusing on getting the current out of the Covid crisis and fixing our economy, ‘Journalist Johnson’ misses the point entirely about the country’s thoughts about our serial shagging head honcho.
Whilst Tory sleaze – with the Greenshill scandal and the likes of Matt Hancock handing out multi-million pound contracts willy-nilly to his mates – is dominating the headlines, I’d argue that our country needs a little less of ‘Costly Carrie’ and not a bit more. With her penchant for £200,000 “monstrous” interior design makeovers and £12,500 deliveries of food from ritzy Daylesford, here is a Barbara Amiel-esque wastrel completely out of touch with the nation.
“Absolutely nothing” is frankly the only acceptable answer.
Next!
Don’t Come On Carrie! Boris Johnson’s current squeeze Carrie Symonds was described by her alleged spreader of fake news about Russia ex-boyfriend Oliver Haiste (sometimes spelt ‘Haste’) as: “Any relationship with Carrie or friendship with Carrie is very intense and can often burn brightly… Never boring… Tumultuous… Intense and passionate… That passion can work the other way when she is not happy with you… It’s the most up and down relationship I have had.”Don’t Come On Carrie! Rumours of Boris Johnson’s affairs continue to do the rounds on social media. Aside from a supposed ongoing fling with a certain tame BBC journalist, the Prime Minister has been repeatedly linked to various Russians.Don’t Come On Carrie! The man pictured left believes “Boris Johnson was sent by Christ” to “fulfill bible prophecy” whilst a parody magazine mocked the Prime Minister with a headline: “Scumbag Exposed! My hubby had TWELVE children before WE MET!”
As ingeniously ironic Old Harrovian wannabe Mayor of London Max Fosh photobombs his fellow Old Harrovian grumpy groaner rival Laurence Fox, their clapped-out Conservative rival Shaun Bailey sinks to likely 3rd place at odds of 64/1
Late last month, Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey’s chances of becoming the next Mayor of London looked to be improving. Whilst odds on him winning were just 45/1 in January, they’d moved to 31/1 and later to 25/1 – in spite of an endorsement from the irksome, well-known associate of dildo floggers, Karren Brady.
Things seemed to finally be swinging in this bombastic berk’s favour, but now, today, Oddschecker shows he’s retreated into third behind Labour’s laughable Sadiq Khan (1/16) and independent oddity Brian Rose (18/1). Today, Bailey stands at an astonishing 64/1 whilst the Liberal Democrats’ Luisa Porritt has sunk to 999/1.
Amusingly, making a complete mockery of him, a seemingly likeable young chap named Max Fosh (100/1) has come forward and raised the £10,000 deposit required to run. The 26-year-old, who studied at Harrow School with Fox, wrapped his car with text that read “Don’t Believe Everything You See On A Bus” and photobombed Fox’s bus.
Shared subsequently on his YouTube channel and watched already by just under 100,000 viewers, Fosh turned up at Fox’s launch event with his car and then introduced himself to the Reclaim leader.
Speaking to The Tab subsequently of his “Max Fosh to Mash Fox” campaign on Friday, Fosh explained:
“The reason I want to beat Laurence is because he seems like a very upset man. He’s a bit of a grumpy guy…. Politics is just a cesspit of name-calling and anger, and it’s just going to make Laurence grumpier. So, I want to beat Laurence in this election to get him out of politics and get him back to doing what he does best.”
“It’s basically a philanthropic mission at this point. Wouldn’t it be nice to see more of such kindness and sincerity in politics today?”
Today, given the quality of candidates on offer in this election is so dire and thus Khan’s likelihood of returning as Mayor is sadly so high, we urge those eligible to do the only sensible thing left available in the absence of our long since departed favoured choice Rory Stewart. Please don’t spoil your vote, but instead back Max Fosh as you first choice and Count Binface as your second.
Doing so on the 6th May 2021 will send a signal to Laurence Fox that in spite of the millions of pounds in wonga behind him, he shouldn’t be in charge of a bus ticket let alone a capital city, but it’ll also do something else: It’ll tell the Tory Party that they made the worst of choices in Shaun Bailey and it might persuade them not to put a twerp of such epic proportions on a ballot paper ever again.
Join the 19,900 followers of Max Fosh on Twitter at @Max_Fosh and Count Binface’s 20,200 at @CountBinface.
Bailey Bombs to 64/1 – Max Fosh might not have the financial resources of Lawrence Fox’s £5 million campaign pot, but he’s creative and likeable. We urge readers to support this breath of fresh air.
Bailey Bombs to 64/1 – Count Binface – formerly Lord Buckethead – has always amused readers of ‘The Steeple Times.’ He’s certainly worth voting for ahead of Sadiq Khan, Shaun Bailey and Brian Rose.
Bailey Bombs to 64/1 – Shaun Bailey was mocked by ‘THis Is North Kensington’ for “wringing the wrong numbers” whilst his campaign was summed up by ‘From The Hornets Nest’ with the following: “The Conservative Party made a massive miscalculation in backing this man. His appalling record as one of the laziest members of the London Assembly should have been a warning that Bailey was an insubstantial dud.”
Wannabe Mayor of London Shaun Bailey makes a berk of himself discussing drug use by the poor; he neglected to mention wealthy coked-up Conservative sorts
In spite of Sadiq Khan having proven himself an utterly incompetent Mayor of London, the Tories are still running in third place behind the frankly Frankenstein-esque whack job Brian Rose.
Featured this morning in the Guardian, speaking before the London Assembly’s economy committee about universal basic income (UBI) yesterday, Bailey bizarrely told those gathered:
“I know some people would absolutely fly if you gave them a lump sum to deal with every week. I know some people who would buy lots of drugs. So where is the care in this, where is the care for the person? How do you get past just universally giving people money?”
Responding to this “extraordinary” baloney, Simon Duffy of the Centre for Welfare Reform thinktank remarked:
“I’m sure the people spending most of the money are not the poor – they’re the well-off. It’s your City traders and their cocaine habits. Where’s the love for them?”
“There is a trope or a myth that ordinary people don’t know how to spend money, and that people who are poor are, in some way, incompetent at spending money. And therefore, what the state needs to do is control them or their spending in some way. This is utterly false.”
“It’s not just false, it’s clearly unproven. It’s clearly the opposite of any evidence we have about the world.”
Previously last August, Bailey was slammed by associate professor of addiction at the University of York Ian Hamilton for calling for random drug testing of all employees in companies employing more than 250 staff.
Writing in the Independent of a policy pledge that would actually just “punish big businesses” primarily, Hamilton commented:
“Bailey’s pledge to introduce workplace drug testing does nothing for his credibility. He knows, or should know, there is no evidence to support this policy. As with legal markets, the drug market is diverse: those dealing and using cocaine are not the same as those using and dealing crack cocaine and heroin. The latter is associated with violence whereas the former is not. So if the justification for invading employees’ privacy is to make a dent in knife crime, all the evidence suggests it will be a failure.”
“But I suspect that isn’t the point of this announcement. It’s a blatant attempt to capitalise on people’s fears and win their votes.”
Elsewhere, in slightly better news for the brazen bozo, Bailey’s odds of actually winning have moved from 45/1 in January to 37/1 on Oddschecker. Still, however, his chances of becoming the next Mayor of London look as likely as that of seeing Madeleine McCann ride into town on Shergar the racehorse.
A Coked Candidate – Later, plainly seeking to justify Shaun Bailey’s latest balderdash whilst failing to respond to the point about coked-up Conservatives, a spokesperson for him arrogantly answered: “Shaun won’t take any lectures from career politicians on what life is like for those struggling to get on.”A Coked Candidate – That Shaun Bailey is trailing even Brian Rose – a genuine oddjob who was arrested in January for “unlawful campaigning” – speaks volumes as to his sheer incompetence and unsuitability to be the next Mayor of London.
A Coked Candidate – In January, on LBC, Shaun Bailey was “tied in knots” after saying “London is unsafe and also the best place in the world.” Responding to his all-over-the-shop contradictory comment, presenter Iain Dale commented: “You sound like Donald Trump.”
Change.org petition started by ‘The Steeple Times’ seeking to ban giraffe slaying monster Merelize van der Merwe from Facebook goes viral with over 4,000 signatures in less than 24 hours
After we picked up on the story of a monster named Merelize van der Merwe massacring a giraffe and then posing with its heart, it went viral. In the last 24 hours, this heartless horror has appeared in The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Independent and seizing upon this The Steeple Times started a petition to seek to persuade Facebook to ban her.
Posted on Change.org, our petition reads:
Merelize van der Merwe (@Merelizevdm) has 80,600 likes and 97,700 followers on Facebook.
On her “public figure” page, this monster shares images of the endangered species she massacres. Amongst them are giraffes, elephants and leopards.
She also shares imagery and videos of herself covered in blood, of dead children and her and her fellow barbarians chopping up their victims.
Why does Facebook, a supposed site with family values, allow this? Instead, they should do the decent thing: Ban her.
Today, we ask that our readers come together to sign this to help put a stop to this vile woman’s celebration of slaying and slaughter. A previous petition started 4 years ago gained just 457 supporters and was closed; ours, started less than 24 hours ago, already has over 4,000 and has gone viral.
Join the 4,000+ individuals who’ve signed our Change.org petition to get the giraffe slaughterer Merelize van der Merwe banned from Facebook by clicking here.
Ban Merelize van der Merwe from Facebook in 2021 – Merelize van der Merwe reacted to our petition by sharing it on Facebook and arrogantly declared: “Thought I’ll help their small-minded cause a bit.” 4,000 people reacted by signing in less than 24 hours, so plainly this deranged deviant has not got as many supporters as she imagined.Ban Merelize van der Merwe from Facebook in 2021 – Whilst this wicked wastrel thinks it acceptable to share imagery of the heart of a giraffe she slayed on Facebook, one has to ask: “Why have they not removed it?” Ban Merelize van der Merwe from Facebook in 2021 – In a post on 6th June 2020, this plainly clinically insane nutcase posed with the blood of something she’d killed all over her face. One has to ask: “Is this something that Facebook should be encouraging?”Ban Merelize van der Merwe from Facebook in 2021 – Merelize van der Merwe is a prolific sharer of offensive content on Facebook. Aside from her gruesome celebration of animal slaying, she shared graphic pictures of a dead child that she “claimed” was killed by a lion in May 2020 as part of her attempt to justify her massacring such creatures. How is it right that such is allowed on a site such as Facebook? It is time for them to ban her.Ban Merelize van der Merwe from Facebook in 2021 – To justify her sick self, van der Merwe included another photo of the supposed victim and claimed the lion to be responsible for the “brutal” attack. One of her equally vile fans, Jim Martin, tartly responded: “Sorry about the youngster.”
At a time of lockup lunacy in early 2021, the last thing we need is the marketing nonsense that is ‘Dry January’ forced upon us; instead, celebrate #DryGinuary
“Dry January will be Wetter Than Ever!” screamed a WSJ Magazine headline on 30th December and today we join those echoing Iris Apfel and Robert Venturi in stating: “More is More and Less is a Bore.” We suggest our readers that so choose should ignore the hype of ‘Dry January’ and at a time when many are locked up and lonely, respond by suggesting that everybody just enjoys themselves and drinks whatever they bloody well wish (in moderation).
“I don’t associate guilt with pleasure,” artist and How to Survive the End of the World podcast hostess Autumn Brown told the article’s author Annie Werner and once again today we remind readers of the legendary French chef Alain Ducasse’s words this time last year:
“I like swimming against the tide. I’ve noted [the Dry January] trend, but I don’t want to see or hear of it, I am opposed to it. [I want to] rid consumers of their inhibitions [with regard to wine drinking].”
Going further and speaking of the dangers of signing up to a month without booze, consultant in liver medicine at the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust Dr Mark Wright told Metro:
“Giving up alcohol for dry January as some sort of detox is like maxing out your credit cards all year and thinking you can solve your financial problems by living like a hermit for a month… It just isn’t going to make things better if you then go back to your usual habits in February. It’s not a fix-all solution.”
Faced with Boris Johnson’s lunacy lockdown in 2021 – where you can buy a leather collar for a dog in pet store (“essential” and open) but not a leather belt for a human in a clothes store (“non-essential” and closed) – we say that Brits that wish should follow the French and say ‘NON!’ to the patronising and pointless campaign that is ‘Dry January’ for once and for all.
Instead, today, we join all those celebrating #DryGinuary this month and raise a glass and an almighty cheers to y’all.
Three gins we recommend this #DryGinuary:
No. 3 London Dry Gin
The only gin in the world crafted by someone with a PhD in gin and owned by the world’s finest wine merchants, Berry Bros & Rudd.
This “authentic [44% ABV] coastal spirit” has notes of samphire and bog myrtle. Hints of salt shine through. It’s a catch and once reeled in, it’ll become a keeper.
