EXCLUSIVE –Ghislaine Maxwell apologist Brian Basham leaves a curious comment on ‘The Steeple Times’ as he part of his campaign to try to free the mucky madam from the clink
With just 164 followers on Twitter, “socialist and vocal republican” PR man Basham – best known for his involvement in the British Airways ‘Dirty Tricks’ scandal – last week left a comment on our aforementioned article containing three links from a domain that curiously “has just been registered.”
Plainly, as he seeks to step up his efforts to get croaked paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s bestie back into her socialite circle, Basham is going into overdrive. Of the links, one went to a piece by the Catholic Herald columnist Brendan O’Neill – a wack job best known for telling high profile sex abuse victims to effectively “shut up” and urging the public to riot in support of speeding up Brexit – arguing that Maxwell should be presumed “innocent until the court demonstrates otherwise.”
Going further, openly extremely anti-woke O’Neill justified his claim by stating: “[Ghislaine Maxwell] is in many ways the ideal hate figure in these woke, unforgiving times. She’s wealthy. She’s the daughter of a disgraced tycoon (Robert Maxwell). She rubbed shoulders with allegedly iffy men and women who have more money than morals. In some people’s minds, she has come to symbolise the rot the heart of the moneyed elites, the cancer of white privilege and rich-people arrogance.”
Basham’s other links included one to The Hill that ludicrously attempted to argue that the Department of Justice have run an “inflammatory” press campaign against Maxwell and another that featured a report about Fox News’ also anti-woke correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera calling out her being denied bail in July as “copping out to the mob” and a “political decision.”
According to the article, Rivera – whom previously called Donald Trump “brave” for sending “good wishes” to Maxwell – also added: “They are doing this to put pressure on her” before bleating: “They are punishing her before conviction… She is not Jeffrey Epstein. I think this a terrible, punitive decision.”
Elsewhere, last week, Air Mail featured news of Maxwell’s attorney yet again moaning about her being “excessively and invasively searched” whilst the New York Post described her legal team “invoking the murder of New Jersey judge Esther Salas’s son” as an “odd reference” as part of their attempt to get the most definite flight risk out on bail.
In a filing, the lawyers bizarrely hinted at a security risk and stupendously stated: “Many of the people who want to support Ms. Maxwell’s renewed bail application are older and do not have the financial means to hire a personal security detail to protect themselves.”
Pictured top: Brian Basham (left) and (right) Ghislaine Maxwell in an embrace with the now “in hiding” alleged sex ring scout paedophile Jean-Luc Brunel (AKA ‘Le Fantôme’ ‘The Ghost’).
Brian Basham has said little thus far on Twitter about his involvement in an attempt to ‘break’ mucky madam Ghislaine Maxwell out of the clink, but he did use the medium to share a tweet from an account that seeks to trash the reputation of alleged victim Virginia Giuffre.Completely ignoring the fact that nobody has been to prove it to be anything other than genuine, in August 2019, Brian Basham tried to hint that the image of Prince Andrew getting randy before supposedly romping in the bathtub with Virginia Giuffre at Ghislaine Maxwell’s house at 44 Kinnerton Street, Belgravia, London, SW1X 8ES on 10th March 2001 is a fake.
Long Island mansion with links to ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Big Short’ for sale for £13.1 million (or 152% more than it sold for in 2011)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) set his ‘Roaring Twenties’ classic The Great Gatsby in the fictional locations of East Egg and West Egg on Long Island and now one of the homes that inspired him is available for sale.
Owned by Cornwall Capital founder James Mai – a man whose firm ironically made over 80 times its capital by buying credit default swaps on CDOs prior to the 2008 financial crisis – and his wife Chiara since 2011, 235 Middle Neck Road at Sands Point on Long Island’s Gold Coast was built in 1926 and home to the Rumsey-Harriman railroad dynasty from 1929.
Fitzgerald is said to have spent time at the residence learning about “the lifestyle of the moneyed aristocracy of Old Westport, Long Island, and their involvement in the movement of eugenics” from the Rumseys and ironically, James Mai, is also representative of a clash between ‘old’ and ‘new’ money. In 2008, he and his partner are said to have been the ones “screaming about [the coming crash] as loud as they could, but everyone turned a deaf ear.” The character Jamie Shipley, played by Finn Wittrock in the 2015 film The Big Short, is loosely based upon him.
Current owners Chiara and James Mai are said to have spent vast sums on the renovation of the estate
Featuring 11,955 square foot of renovated accommodation that includes formal and informal entertaining spaces, 13 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. There is also a 6-car garage with a 3-bedroom caretaker’s cottage, a 4-bedroom beachside cottage and a boat house.
Outside, on a plot of some 5.3 acres, there is a 391-foot private beach, a tennis court and in spite of its seeming isolation, the property is situated just 29 miles from Downtown Manhattan and 25 minutes by boat.
235 Middle Neck Road is listed by Nava Mitnick of Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International. In December 2016, of it, she commented: “Obviously, it’s so imposing – you drive down and see the sweeping views. But when we entered the house, I described it as a ‘glorified cottage’, because it’s so homey.”
Not afraid of lavish gestures, American socialite Maya Henry was treated to a £1.4 million 15th birthday party by her personal injury specialist lawyer father Thomas J. Henry and his wife Azteca in February 2016. (more…)
This “ebullient” American’s name is most apt. A former Barclays bank executive who likes to wear sunglasses come rain or shine, Ricci retired to a Kentish mansion at 49 and supposedly travels by private jet to Dublin every weekend as he “just love[s] Irish racing”. With 40 horses in training and a take home total of £44 million in 2010 alone, he needn’t and doesn’t do things by half and even once named a horse Fatcatinahat in honour of an article The Independent ran on him. Whilst Bob may have had the Diamond position during their days at the bank, it is Ricci who remains truly Rich.
The Steeple Times asks emerging market investor David Reuben Jr: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”
The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom”. What’s your guiding force?
I try to follow the “Golden Rule”. Treat others the way you would prefer that they treat you. Be careful how you are with people on your way up, you just might meet them on the way down.
“Don’t get even, get medieval” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?
If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is probably not for you.
This mouthpiece was born in Rettendon, Essex in 1958 and vents bile on all manner of subjects. Articles such as: “Why don’t more women moan like me?” and “Liz Jones’ baby craving drove her to steal husband’s sperm in ultimate deception” are frankly illustrative of why she’s so unpopular. After she got banned from the majority of fashion shows and her husband left her, she quit London for Somerset in 2007 to feed organic muesli to the rats in the barns of a 47-acre farm she purchased as her “rural idyll.” That misadventure came to a sticky end in November 2012 after she’d alienated the whole county by calling them, amongst other things, “smelly” and “faintly Amish.” Goodness knows whom she’ll choose to offend next. Phillip Schofield sums her up best: “She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged.” Our advice: Just steer well clear of this acid tongued poison pen.
Matthew Steeples examines the truth behind Liz Jones giving up on her “rural idyll”
The Mail’s Liz Jones is a waspish woman who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Those who’ve paid even a moment’s attention to her bleating, will be familiar with lines such as: “Last week, my brand new £1,300 MacBook Pro broke” and “Phil Spencer wanted his £46,000 and he wanted it now!” She never stops talking about money and the size of what she both owns and owes.
Liz Jones
In today’s Femail, Jones bores on about about how she feels “like a cross-dresser” trying out the Kardashian Kollection of clothing in a pointed attack on Kim Kardashian, but it was for her diatribe yesterday that she truly got the goat of the nation in “[bidding] a ferocious farewell” to life in the country in an article entitled “Goodbye… and good riddance!” 2,151 people have commented so far and most of them have been far from sympathetic.
When Upcott Farm at Brushford, near Dulverton in Somerset came up for sale in 2007 at a price of £1.6 million, it featured in an article by The Telegraph’s Caroline McGhie. The 5-bedroomed farmhouse came with a 2-bedroom annexe, a courtyard of barns and stables and 47 acres of land. McGhie waxed lyrical about the merits of moving to this location: “People come here for the peace and quiet, the night skies, the dramatic coastline, and they work from home,” she stated before adding: “You can find everything here, including butchers, bakers, afternoon tea and cake, fish and chips, an art gallery and a shop selling fishing tackle.” Of Upcott Farm itself, she concluded:
“This would suit a member of the new wave of buyers dubbed Droppies (Disillusioned Relatively Ordinary Professionals Preferring Independent Employment Situations).”
McGhie got it half right: Upcott Farm sold to someone who considers herself far from “relatively ordinary” and someone who is far from “professional.” The purchaser, however, was certainly someone who’d become “disillusioned” with what she’d bought and someone whose desire to be “independent” and create a “situation” just alienated all she encountered. The buyer, you’ve guessed it, was none other than Elizabeth Ann Jones.
Jones was born in Brentwood, Essex in 1958 and studied journalism at the London College of Printing. She became editor of Marie Claire in 1999 but was sacked, she herself suggests, for “listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month.” Here, it seems, began Jones’s obsession with all things material and here she also met an Indian BBC radio journalist named Nirpal Dhaliwal in 2000.
Jones married Dhaliwal but the union was to prove an “utter disaster” as he had affairs with women she terms “younger, dimmer [and] slimmer.” “I’m no racist” Jones was divorced in 2007 and said goodbye to her “3,000 square foot of Islington real estate” and “easy, if super-busy, London life” in favour of the green, green grass of Somerset.
Whoever’s side you see it from, five years of hell followed. Jones baited the locals and they grew to loathe her. She wrote columns and a book, The Exmoor Files, where she attacked them as “faintly Amish… feral, old and smelly” and another hack and neighbour, Jane Alexander of The Telegraph, responded: “Dulverton [was] positively fizzing with fury” after each and every publication.
Of the local restaurants, Jones stated:
“I have given up trying to eat out in restaurants here on Exmoor… It is still stuck in the Seventies, with only things in baskets and rum babas on the menu… If you tell the waiter you are vegetarian, you are stared at, incredulously, as if you are black.”
She whinged about her inability to find love:
”I will never, ever meet a man here in the middle of a moor, where even to be in possession of your own teeth is a bonus.”
And whined about fieldsports:
“I didn’t increase my popularity by being unable to pass a party of men and often children with guns, shooting rabbits and deer, without getting out of my BMW and saying: ‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your Saturday morning?’ The look of shock on their faces that I had the cheek to challenge them was priceless. I would stop, too, and shout at huntsmen on horses, galloping on tarmaced roads, one hand on the reins, the other clamping a mobile phone to their heads. ‘You will ruin your horses’ tendons!’ I would wail.”
Whilst Jones found little to like in her new community, they found nothing positive in her arrival either. Her dog was blamed for worrying lambs, and Jones’s inability to control it, locals say, was an indicator of the chasm between her life and theirs. In 2009, one neighbour went as far as to tell Danny Brierley of The Independent:
“We have got nothing in common with her, really. I think she may find it difficult to make any kind of life here now. She is not a very friendly person and we are all sick to death of talking about Liz Jones. A hatred has been building up for months. She is actually having a go at people and they are not going to tolerate that. She has feelings like all people, of course she has. But everyone wants her to leave and leave now. No one can make her, but we think she will go. I don’t see how you can live in such a small community with people who think that way about you.”
Matters came to a head when Jones’s precious black BMW convertible, “bought in 2005 for £26,000,” was pelted with eggs and teenagers fired shots at her letterbox with an air rifle. A local councilor even dressed up as her in the local carnival and yesterday Jones took revenge on those she blames for her “five-year prison sentence” and deprivation from Space NK, Cath Kidston and Illy coffee.
Instead, the article just shows the true reality of this bombastic harpy. The lines Jones penned speak for themselves. Country people don’t welcome someone who planned to “hack for miles across the open moorland in my Prada jodhpurs” anymore than the folk of Knightsbridge welcome Arabs treating their roads like racetracks. The gardener who had to endure Jones yelling “walk faster!” at him didn’t deserve such anymore than a bus driver in SW11 deserves abuse from his passengers. Jones concludes:
“I’m now a different person. I became so lonely. I would often get in my car, not just for the warmth, but for the kind voice of the satnav lady. I’ve learned that an amazing view and a pair of nesting grey herons are not enough to make me happy.”
27 acres of land including paddocks and a fishing lake remain on the market through Savills and Strutt & Parker at a price of £200,000 at Upcott Farm
Miss Jones bleats that she’s taken a £500,000 loss on Upcott Farm, which languished on the market at first at £1,900,000 and then £1,750,000 for three years. The “unexpected” sale of the property has given her the ability to “flee back to the city” but the locals and even the “Droopies” should be warned: there’s still 27 acres of the farm unsold and on the market at a price of £200,000. Halloween may have passed but the battleaxe in the Beemer could still call again.
