Well-known bully Priti Patel inspires a bingo game after her latest “egregious” telly box blunder over Christmas Covid-19 rules
This morning, finger wagging firebrand Priti Patel did what she does best during an appearance on the telly box: The Home Secretary made a total prat of herself by contradicting her never-sorry self.
Appearing variously on BBC Breakfast, Sky News and ITV1’s Good Morning Britain, Patel – a woman well known for irritatingly saying “movin’” rather than “moving” – showed her incompetence by moving the goalposts of what is and what is not allowed this Christmas.
Mocked resultingly on Twitter and summed up a “bit of [a] bully” in a mocked up Bullseye poster, Patel again proved herself a shameless snitch in remarking: “If I saw somebody flouting coronavirus regulations and the laws, of course I would look to inform the police about that.” 2020’s ultimate “neighbour from hell” then contradicted herself by adding: “[The police’s] role is only to enforce egregious breaches… We’re not here to criminalise people.”
Could someone in government now do us all a favour? Please put poisonous Priti Patel back in the dart box for Christmas.
A Bit of A Bully –The Twitter user to most accurately sum up the Home Secretary’s latest telly box appearance was one Mark Steel. He remarked: “At last something good has come of Covid. Priti Patel says she won’t be visiting her parents for Christmas. They must be fucking delighted.”A Bit of A Bully – Twitter user Matthew Payne rightly surmised the shameful contradictory nature of Priti Patel on coronavirus: She’d report her neighbours, but she was happy to let off Dominic Cummings.A Bit of A Bully – Amusingly, a gentleman named Mike Sweet tweeted: “Priti Patel has a weirdly irritating way of speaking which is difficult to categorise. She is incapable of pronouncing the end sound to lots of words, and yet simultaneously sounds as if she is aping a ‘posh’ accent. It’s all very Mrs Bucket.” A Bit of A Bully – Another Twitter user shared a new game called ‘Priti Patel Bingo’ complete with an accurate analysis of her misuse of words like “moving,” going,” “working” and “doing.”
Moving on homes owned by the newsworthy – including a country house apartment in a castle currently owned by Jasper Conran and the childhood homes of Al Capone and Jackie Kennedy
Soppy Savills Fail to Salivate
https://vimeo.com/227878828
Jasper Conran OBE paid just £2.75 million ($3.43 million, €3.04 million or درهم12.61 million) for New Wardour Castle in Tisbury, Wiltshire in August 2010. The catch? He didn’t get the whole James Paine and Giacomo Quarenghi designed Palladian mansion, but as the Daily Mail’sAlexis Parr reported at that time he “captured” 23,185 square foot of a repossessed building divided into a total of ten flats. ‘Apartment 1,’ as the space the designer son of Sir Terence Conran currently owns is known as, includes 8 reception rooms, 6 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms.
Agents Savills could have enthused gushingly about the Grade I listed building and its spectacular 60-foot central rotunda, but instead they are simply seeking £3.95 million ($4.93 million, €4.36 million or درهم18.12 million) for what they underwhelmingly market as the “largest [apartment] in Wiltshire.” Conran would have done better to have appointed someone more akin to the late Roy Brooks we’d say – at least he’d have showed some flowery enthusiasm for this capacious crib.
From Electric to Insta
‘The James Seymour Mansion,’ the £37,000 ($50,000, €45,000 or درهم184,000) Gothic revival mansion in New York State The Steeple Times featured in December 2019, has finally got itself new owners after 204 submissions from across the world to buy it.
Creatively marketed by Michael DeRosa on behalf of the local authority after a property tax foreclosure, the 10-bedroom house on a 0.9-acre plot is situated in Auburn, Cayuga County – a place best known for being the gruesome location of the world’s first legal execution using an electric chair in August 1890.
Whilst the process of the death of “vegetable peddler and known alcoholic” William Kemmler (whom murdered his common-law wife in March 1888) was regarded as a “historic bungle,” all worked out well James and Katie Joynt and their seven children. The family – whom currently manage an Amish co-op in Pennsylvania – will spend around £123,000 ($155,000, €136,000 or درهم565,000) restoring the house according to New York Upstate and are going to take the crumbling house into the 21st century whilst documenting their journey on Instagram.
Going Gangsta
Of a New York “multi-family townhouse” at 21 Garfield Place, North Slope in June 2017, the New York Post quipped: “A Brooklyn homeowner hopes a mob of buyers will take a shot at this town house.” That property was sold for £1.94 million ($2.42 million, €2.14 million or درهم8.89 million) in early 2018 to an Emmy award winning television producer named Steven Kalifowitz and is now again for sale, this time for £2.3 million ($2.9 million, €2.6 million or درهم10.7 million).
Agents Douglas Elliman neglect to mention that the 2,980 square foot building – which is “currently configured as an owner’s duplex with two spacious one bedroom apartments above” – was a childhood home of the gangster Al Capone (1899 – 1947) in the early 1900s. 21 Garfield Place previously sold for a “little more than £800,000 ($1 million, €885,000 or درهم3.7 million)” according to The New York Times in July 2006 and now looks anything but like a bootlegger’s workplace; there’s even a child’s playroom in the basement.
Anything But A Discount Holiday
Those looking to escape to the Hamptons post-lockdown could do worse than purchase the childhood summer home of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929 – 1994) – if they’ve got £6 million ($7.5 million, €6.6 million or درهم27.5 million) going spare.
Built in 1895, Wildmoor at East Hampton extends to 4,291 square foot and has 6 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. It’s on the market through Paula S. Bulter of Sotheby’s International Realty and also noteworthy is that an art studio on the property was used for many years by the Abstract Expressionist artist Adolph Gottlieb (1903 – 1974).
Gottlieb purchased the shingled house on a 0.92-acre plot in 1960, but interested buyers should note that the current décor scheme is definitely a bit passé. As Kennedy herself once said: “It looks like it’s been furnished by discount stores.”
Moving on homes owned by the newsworthy – including properties owned by society snapper Sir Cecil Beaton, novelist Jackie Collins and film producer-director Peter Minns.
A Tennis Court Teardown
Paris Hilton’s dad Rick’s realty firm Hilton & Hyland has just launched to the market the former Beverly Hills home of the late Jackie Collins OBE (1937 – 2015) for £13.4 million ($16.95 million). They don’t say much about the bonkbuster author’s residence of some 25 years other than: “Secluded behind gates and foliage lies a great opportunity to purchase a tennis court… Home could use a remodel or rebuild.” Miss Collins and her second husband art gallery owner Oscar Lerman paid £2.4 million ($3 million) for 5,269 square foot 614 N Beverly Drive in 1991.
Limited Living in the ‘Hampshire Highlands’
https://vimeo.com/358107497/b6629a2217
Reduced in price from £4 million ($5.1 million) in September 2019 to £3.73 million ($4.72 million) now through agents BCM, The Oast House at Hartley Mauditt in the South Downs National Park in Hampshire was converted by film producer-director Peter Minns in the 1990s.
This delightful ‘mini estate’ looks like something that could have been in of The Darling Buds of May and comes with 76.28 acres of land suitable for ‘stick and ball’ polo, but the problem is this – a planning stipulation dictates that the majority of the main house is only allowed to be on a “short-term” basis whilst two cottages are for “holiday or seasonal worker use” and a bungalow is limited to “anyone fully employed in agriculture.”
Minns is best known for having produced programmes including Mad Cows & Englishmen for the BBC, A Question of Sleaze – The Neil Hamilton Story for Channel 4 and Citizen 2000 – which followed the lives of twenty children who became 18 in the year 2000.
Moving on Sir Cecil’s Seat
£4 million ($5.1 million) is sought for Queen Anne Reddish House in the Chalke Valley in Wiltshire by agents Savills. Society snapper Sir Cecil Beaton CBE, owner from 1947 until his death in 1980, described it as: “My dream home” and an “exquisite country seat” and between 1987 and 1999, it was home to the I Want to Be Free singer Toyah Wilcox. Aside from 6 acres of glorious gardens, the Grade II* listed house comes with two cottages, a range of follies and a water meadow. Locked-down Instagrammers have been moving all over its marketing brochure and sharing photos online, with one even gushing: “It’s the prettiest house I’ve seen EVER… EVER.”
ITV’s ‘Quiz’ has definitely left the public questioning the conviction of the ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ £1 million cheat Major Charles Ingram in 2003, but what the programme did not reveal is actually more fascinating
“After all that, can we be sure the Ingrams were guilty?” asked The Telegraph’s Chris Bennion in his review of the final episode of the three-part hit, Quiz, and indeed the ending has achieved the inevitable and will likely reignite interest in a story that dates back to 2001.
For the few that may not remember what occurred, a Major Charles Ingram won the maximum prize of £1 million on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on the 10th September 2001, the day before the 9/11 attacks on America. Ingram’s wife and her brother, Adrian Pollock, had previously each won £32,000.
Immediately after the jackpot was scooped, the programme’s production company, Celador, suspecting Ingram had cheated suspended payment of the winnings. The police were called in and ultimately, after a four week trial in March and April 2003 at Southwark Crown Court, the Ingrams and another contestant, a lecturer and their alleged accomplice, Tecwen Whittock, were convicted of “procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception.” All three were given prison sentences suspended for two years, fined £15,000 each and ordered to pay £10,000 towards prosecution costs. These sums were later reduced on appeal.
Whilst many will know that Ingram was then forced to resign his commission as a major after 17 years and that he and his wife appeared on countless television shows including The Weakest Link, sadly Quiz did not delve into other bizarre twists in this “eccentric” pair’s life in the time since their “fifteen minutes of coughing fame/shame.”
Aside from being bankrupted four times in the intervening years (most recently in 2019), the former army officer chopped three of his toes off in a freak lawnmower accident in September 2010. Ironically, the “cheat” and then resident of Easterton, Wiltshire did the injury when he “slipped on a rotten apple.” Of the incident, Ingram recalled “lying on the grass” and thinking: “Oh dear… I certainly won’t be mowing any lawns again soon.”
Earlier, yet not long after his Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? conviction in November 2003, Ingram was convicted of an entirely unrelated insurance fraud. Found guilty of obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception and of deception by trying to claim on that policy after an alleged burglary, the already disgraced son of a retired RAF wing commander added a two-year conditional discharge to his burgeoning rap sheet.
The Ingrams, now, but not revealed in the show either, are based in Maiden Bradley, Warminster and run a non-registered for UK VAT company that trades as ‘Diana Ingram.’ It sells Murano glass jewellery for prices ranging from £15 to £75 and of her wares, Mrs Ingram states: “Most products listed can be altered for shape, colour, length, etc., though prices may vary. I ship worldwide and nothing is too much trouble – I regularly offer personalised wrapping and buy and write birthday cards too!” No mention is made as to whether any kind of cheat sheets can be enclosed if requested sadly.
Charles Ingram, meanwhile, has kept himself busy on Twitter since September 2013 using the handle @gallantfive. He describes himself as: “English, Irish, European, Family, Labour, LUFC and proud remainer wanting a fairer world” and has over 7,100 followers. Whilst describing Quiz as “simply brilliant” and “terrifyingly accurate,” his family have plainly had a few visits from the media as a result of the show. Now represented by one Skye Redman at 89up, a firm that somewhat immodestly has self-appointed itself as “Europe’s biggest communications agency for great causes,” the ex-major this week tweeted:
“Media: Please #StayHomeSaveLives. In any event I assure you that doorstepping is wasting your time. My solicitor, Rhona Friedman, is available for comment via phone or video conferencing. For interviews please contact Skye Redman at 89up.”
After the conclusion of Quiz, Friedman told the Guardian: “I just know that they did not do it… I just feel very sorry for them.” She intends to file paperwork associated with the case in the summer “with hopes for a hearing at the end of the year,” and given the reaction of the public after the ending of this week’s dramatisation, one thing’s for sure: We’ve not seen the last of ‘The Coughing Major’ and his ever-so-earnest wife just yet.
Your Move estate agency employee sues firm for constructive dismissal and sexual harassment after boss allegedly offered him a blowjob if he hit targets
An estate agency firm took rewards for good performance to another level if allegations made in a Croydon courtroom this week are to be believed.
According to The Sun, Sarah Thompson, 51, who works at Your Move’s regional headquarters in Chessington offered to perform a sex act on a national financial services director at the same firm if he hit his targets.
Paul Elworthy, 45, alleges Miss Thompson stated: “If you bank £180,000, I’ll give you a blowjob” at a boozy senior consultants’ reward lunch. He added: “This was said to me in the presence of a number of people. It made me feel very uncomfortable”.
Giles Barrett, a fellow employee at Your Move – a firm that describes itself as “Britain’s most visited estate agent” – has backed up Elworthy’s claim and though the company and Miss Thompson strenuously deny the claims, a judgement is expected shortly.
Gareth Southgate markets his £3.25 million Grade I listed Yorkshire home
Footballers are not generally noted for living in tasteful homes so it is somewhat surprising to find that the former England player turned Middlesborough manager Gareth Southgate’s current home is a Grade I listed “Elizabethan style” hall on the banks of Swinsty Reservoir, nine miles west of Harrogate. He and his wife Alison have owned it since 2006 but have been trying to sell it since June 2013. (more…)
Frankie Dettori puts his Voysey designed country house up for sale
Champion jockey Frankie Dettori is best known for his “flying dismounts” and for having won seven out of seven races at Ascot in 1996. He currently lives at Stetchworth on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border near Newmarket but is now selling his home there. (more…)
Original Scotland Yard site to become hotel ‘of the quality of Chateau Marmont’
An Edwardian building on the site of the original Scotland Yard is to be converted into a 92,000 square foot, 235-bedroom 5-star hotel of the “world class… quality of The Mercer or the Chateau Marmont” (more…)
