Competition to win a Knightsbridge flat for £10 per ticket neglects to mention its former occupier, a convicted ‘gay sex plot’ royal blackmailer who died in 2016
Increasingly, with sellers unable to offload prime properties due to Theresa May’s inability to secure any kind of Brexit deal and the ongoing effects of former Chancellor George Osborne’s increases to stamp duty, those with luxury flats and houses are turning to raffling them.
An example of such comes in in the form of a ground and first floor maisonette on the corner of Walton Street and Beauchamp Place in London’s Knightsbridge. Extending to 1,063 square foot and including a large reception room, 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, the aforementioned fully furnished property is ambitiously being touted as being worth £3.2 million in spite of having sold for just £1.4 million in 2007 and £575,000 in 2000.
The ground floor sitting room of the flat; the property has been marketed for rental at a price of £2,750 per week in times pastBisexual ‘royal blackmailer’ Ian Strachan lived in the flat for a period following his release from jail
Now marketed in a competition by a company named Your Laddr – run by a former Alexander McQueen merchandiser named Santa Agolli – for £10 a ticket, Flat 1 at 132 Walton Street, SW3 is being promoted without mention of one of its most recent occupants, a controversial and now deceased ‘royal blackmailer’ who’d sought £50,000 for a set of recordings from various national newspapers in 2007.
Tried under the name of Paul Aðalsteinsson (other aliases included Paul Adalsteinsson, Paul Stein and Charles Goldstein), Grimsby trawlerman’s son turned “playboy” Ian Strachan lived at 132 Walton Street after being released following serving a sentence of five years for a gay sex blackmail plot against an unnamed, married member of the royal family. He subsequently had his left leg amputated following a 30-foot fall from a balcony in Imperial Wharf, SW6 in 2013 and then spent 10 months in jail in Dubai in 2015 after crashing an Audi R8. He died aged just 40 of a drug overdose in South Kensington on Christmas Eve 2016.
The winner of Flat 132, Walton Street will have their stamp duty, legal fees and council tax for one year paid as part of the prize. In addition, they will be ‘given’ a 2017 Jeep Wrangler Black Hawk with 800 miles on the clock, a cash amount of upto £4,000 to cover insurance for one year and a cash payment to cover a Kensington and Chelsea parking permit for one year also. Hopefully they’ll have better luck than the tragic Mr Strachan; may he rest in peace.
August 2018 – Prize draw remains open indicating that ticket sales must be rather slow.
December 2017 – Offered in a raffle for £10 per ticket with a minimum of 380,000 tickets needed to be sold. This would equate to a return of£3.8 million ($4.9 million, €4.2 million or درهم17.9 million) in ticket sales.
November 2007 – Sold for £1.436 million ($1.845 million, €1.581 million or درهم6.776 million).
October 2000 – Sold for £575,000 ($739,000, €633,000 or درهم2.713 million).
New restaurant critic David G. Lennox reviews Brompton Cross’s latest opening, Caramel London
In a knockout punch, the last of the grand old chatelaines of Kensington and the dowagers of Chelsea – not to mention their urbane nephews, in euro tweed and gossiping nieces, donning sunglasses to disguise their latest Bystander appearance – have been blown away.
The space formerly occupied by Brompton Cross’s La Brasserie has been reincarnated and pimped up to proportions that would leave corrupt dictators grinning and wealthy divorcees wincing through their plastic surgery; before prowling upon their next victim in their under length but overshined dresses in what can only be described as seduction booths which make up one rear side of the restaurant.
La Brasserie was the ideal place to break up a ‘walk of shame’ (or ‘stride of pride’) with a solo breakfast or worse still as the dumping point after a Raffles or 151 conquest – the orange juice was always top drawer and the necessity to talk minimalised by abrupt staff. But it would go on all day – coffee and a stale croissant – steak frites – an absurdly good value happy hour in the hope of meeting an evening beauty, and if not, some perfectly passable coq au vin or a veal Holstein and pomme puree and more drinks. It attracted characters, observers, faded beauties complaining at the noise not to mention the unlikely spot for an attempted hit on Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal – who was rumoured to be living incognito around the corner. The unpublishable stories are rife.
‘La Bras’ (as it was fondly known to those in the know) was a diary of Royal Borough life which always entertained and the food had a reliability which only regulars could fully comprehend. It sort of did what it said on the tin – but there was no tin. If it were in Paris, it would have been vilified. At Brompton Cross, it sort of worked.
Now patrolling this wonderful piece of no man’s land, which among about four things it could be (Chelsea, South Kensington, Brompton Cross, Brompton), we have Caramel London.
The room is black with a glass ceiling that promises to yield poles if only glass were magically removed at a certain hour. There is an anticipation whilst sitting down that a show is about to begin and that something rather adult in the most childish possible sense is about to ensue. This is lunchtime and I feel like I am in a Miami Beach nightclub which doesn’t get going until about 3am.
Bathetically, the waiter then entices us to have a cocktail. This no anti-climax – these are magnificent – the Negroni has a huge cube of ice in its tumbler and the vodka martini has a lovely balance where the droplets of vermouth take out the fumes of the spirit, also in a very good glass – the liquid is chilled naturally and is utterly smooth and delicious. Indeed, these are cocktails of the class you may expect at The Connaught or top-end hotel bars in London and anything you can find in Chelsea, or wherever we are.
Then came offerings defined as “shared for the table” – I hate this sort of language – the plates are never too big for one – you might want a really nice plate of acorn fed Iberico ham for instance – but this seems an excuse to introduce a pre-starter course or get nice people to spend extra money because they like the idea of “sharing.”
However, all was forgiven when a missile like double pyramid of prawns appeared in a big gold martini glass – TNT shrimp – they were well and truly off the charts and plentiful, glued together with a hot mayonnaise that was zingy enough to patent. It sounds completely and utterly repulsive but somehow it worked magically. Pure ‘prawnography.’ The prawns had a more swallowable give and tenderness when compared with those bouncy muscular shrimp that contaminate the States. The fact they were totally impractical to eat merely added to the absurdly glorious idea of what this space had transformed itself into. This was a knockout punch which may just bring a few of the old souls back to life from some of their pre-mausoleums upstairs or around the corner.
We then were given some really good beef sliders in a soft homemade brioche type bap that was excellent, some well-judged Chilean sea bass on a rather over creamy un-Italian risotto, with a nice enough lobster broth – the dish was ruined by some over-extracted tomato salsa paste concoction that went with absolutely nothing. And then a short rib pappardelle which had a deep and unctuous sauce but the pasta a bit thick, cardboardy and gluey and an unnecessary pimping up with black truffles that could not be tasted against such depth of flavour. Again, a thoroughly un-Italian pasta dish.
The Nutella gnocchi we had for pudding put us back on course. They were excellent oozing out chocolatiness.
The cooking at Caramel is actually promising, but I suspect the chef has been made add some culinary plastic surgery like truffles and lobster to get the perfect fit for the likely clientele. Though only time will tell what that clientele is, I will be happy to drink the cocktails and pad out on the prawns whilst it attempts to resolve its confusions.
London has simply become a money park for dodgy money and though ‘McMafia’ reflected elements of that, the truth is far more depressing
Since the 1st January, the nation was engrossed (though many were also totally bored) by the BBC’s eight-part drama series McMafia.
Based on a fictional – though plainly inspired by the likes of the late Boris Berezovsky – Russian mafia family relocated to London, the TV adaptation of this thriller was filmed primarily in Knightsbridge, Mayfair and South Kensington. It showcased what many might consider the extreme wealth of Central London, but, in fact, was presented a little bit amateurishly.
Of the show, Carol Midgley in The Times summed it up well. She remarked: “If this is how miserably the super-rich live, I’d take a semi in Swindon any day” and equally now, if you wander the streets of SW1, SW3, SW7 and W1, you’d not disagree with her.
Recent news that the Fine Art Society is closing in Bond Street after 140 years due to “soaring rents” and “an influx of wealthy international fashion houses” illustrates the effect of the arrival of uncultivated new wealth in that sector, but equally sad is the demise of local restaurants and shops that actually provide things that genuine, full-time residents actually need.
Boarded up in Belgravia this month, after 44 years in operation, the Ebury Wine Bar closed supposedly due to the retirement of its owner, Nigel Windridge. Also gone – aside from the key loss of the much loved La Brasserie in Brompton Cross – are restaurants like Itsu in Walton Street and Racine in Brompton Road. Replaced by shisha bars and other businesses aimed at wealthy Gulfies and oligarchs, the streets of Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea are increasingly becoming utterly devoid of character.
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Ultimate bachelor pad for sale for £6 million in South Kensington; it has garaging for five cars
Originally a mews that was home to Rothmans’ Shire horses, a £6 million ($8.5 million, €6.8 million or درهم31.1 million) property in Elvaston Mews, South Kensington has been transformed into a perfect bachelor pad.
Sold in July 2006 for £1.95 million ($2.75 million, €2.21 million or درهم10.11 million), 7 Elvaston Mews extends to 2,552 square foot and is primarily made up of a 53-foot long state-of-the-art garage on the ground level with an internal office and cloakroom.
Situated in the heart of an area known as the ‘Queen’s Gate Grid’, this petrolhead’s paradise also comes with an “immaculately presented” two double bedroom apartment above. It features a large reception room, a dining kitchen, two shower rooms and two terraces.
Both Labour and the Tories get it very wrong in Kensington and disgrace themselves with their truly offensive conduct
On Monday, the political blog Guido Fawkes exposed the new Member of Parliament for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, as having viciously called a black Tory candidate named Shaun Bailey as a “token ghetto boy,” “gobby and dangerous,” a “free-loading scumbag” and “the most hated man in North Kensington” back in 2010 in a post on her blog.
Elsewhere, on Twitter, various users shared a survey circulated by Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham Conservatives that disgustingly asked residents of the Courtfield Ward to rate the importance of the Grenfell Tower tragedy on a scale of one-to-ten in terms of its importance.
One is only left asking: What on earth is wrong with these moronic people? Have they not an ounce of sense?
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Emma Dent Coad MP likes to blog and tweet yet blocked her now constituent Matthew Steeples on Twitter after he asked her about the hidden homeless problem in South Kensington prior to her election; she claimed to be “too busy” to answer himThe disgraceful survey put out by Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham Conservatives
Protestors descend on H.R. Owen Ferrari dealership in South Kensington screaming: “Kill the Rich!”
On Saturday afternoon a bunch of protestors held a protest outside the Brompton Road Ferrari dealership H.R. Owen.
Seemingly something to do with rights for cleaners, the assembled ragbag waved Communist flags and shouted: “Kill the rich!” and “Fight back!” Aside from banners about dirt, the mop wielding mob displayed a banner declaring: “Class war: We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live” and proceeded to block the street for over half an hour.
As security guards and officers of the law descended, a near neighbour of the showroom told The Steeple Times: “The police couldn’t do anything as they told me there were not enough of them to stop these despicable people blocking the road. It’s awful and I am afraid that they’ll smash the windows and trash the beautiful cars.”
Elsewhere, on social media, organisers of the gathering shared posts that declared: “Sack us and we’ll shut you down!” and urged participants to: “Bring your noise and anger.”
A pioneer of both the Art Deco style and the functionalist Modernist movement, bisexual Irish aristocrat Eileen Gray was best known for designing the Bibendum chair and the E.1027 table. This great tastemaker lived primarily in South Kensington, Paris and the South of France and another of her creations, once owned by Yves Saint Laurent, the ‘Fauteuil aux Dragons’ armchair, sold for £19 million at auction in 2009.
Extremely private, Gray once remarked: “The art of the engineer is not enough… A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. Not only its visual harmony but its organisation as a whole, the whole work combined together, make it human in the most profound sense.”
A stunning example of Eileen Gray’s work, an S-bend chair, is on display in Room 135, The Dr. Susan Weber Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Eileen Gray also designed the ‘E.1027’ house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, overlooking the Bay of Monaco in Franc as a gift for her lover, Jean Badovici, the editor of ‘L’Architecture Vivante’. ‘E’ is for Eileen, ‘10’ for the tenth letter of the alphabet, ‘J’ for Jean, ‘2’ for ‘B’ for Badovici and ‘7’ for ‘G’ for Gray. The building was completed in 1929.
The E-1027 table was designed for the eponymous house in 1927.
‘SHIT’ to be sold at Christie’s in South Kensington; it comes at quite a price
A painting which simply depicts the word ‘SHIT’ is to be sold at Christie’s in South Kensington, London this month.
Offered with an estimate of £2,000 to £4,000 ($2,590 to $5,180, €2,260 to €4,520 or درهم9,470 to درهم18,940) in spite of having been painted with household gloss, the work by Kent born, New York based artist and filmmaker Sarah Morris (born 1967) is 153 centimetres by 244 centimetres and simply reads: ‘SHIT’ in capital letters.
Other works by Morris are displayed at Gloucester Road tube station, the V&A and the Tate Modern in London, the Hamburger Bahnholf in Berlin, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Christie’s will auction the work, which is dated 1996 on the reverse, on 19th July. It was acquired by the current owner from Jay Jopling in London.
Sarah Morris with another of her works; she is described as having a style that uses bright color fields and graphic line work, often referencing elements of architecture and taking titles from bureaucratic institutions.
Matthew Steeples takes tea in the delightful courtyard garden at Blakes Hotel in South Kensington, London
Blakes Hotel is synonymous with the now much overused description “boutique hotel” and is generally considered the world’s first. It opened in 1978, is a destination that is popular with the likes of Seal and Sharon Stone and was also the place The Steeple Times chose to launch exactly five years ago in June 2012.
Aside from moving the restaurant of this enchanting South Kensington palace of opulence to the building’s ground floor last year, the hotel’s rear courtyard was transformed by designer Matthew Williamson in mid-2016. Featuring bright colours and such things as a prancing zebra, I recently enjoyed tea there in the summer heat with my friend Ekaterina Fields. I was charmed by not only the most attentive of staff but also the finest small-batch teas by a firm named Lalani & Co.
Available for £12.75 and each paired with éclairs by Maître Choux, Blakes have curated four teas that will take you on a journey through Kyoto, Megalaya and Nepal. They range from the fruity to the chocolaty in taste and accompanied by a glass of prosecco or gin and tonic, one is left asking: “What could be better on a balmy June afternoon?”
Blakes Hotel, 33 Roland Gardens, London SW7 3PF. Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7370 6701.
New Kensington MP Emma Dent Coad fails to join Labour heavyweights showing support for the single market
Prior to her victory, the now newly elected Member of Parliament for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, clearly and repeatedly said she’d “fight to retain access to the single market”. Yesterday, however, she failed to join a whole array of fellow Labour politicians demanding exactly such and in doing so has left constituents questioning her true commitment to fighting ‘Hard Brexit’.
Aside from the fact that some of the party’s busiest and best known figures – including David Lammy MP, Stella Creasy MP and Chuka Umunna MP – bothered, unlike her, to sign a letter to The Guardian “supporting British membership of the single market after Brexit”, Dent Coad’s previous statement of: “Three in four people in Kensington voted to remain, and I will ensure their voices are heard” is beginning to appear rather hollow.
The electorate of Kensington are primarily ‘Remainers’ and given she also had the backing of Gina Miller’s Best for Britain on her path to power, Dent Coad must now speak up. We understand her priorities at this time must be with supporting the victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, but this believer that ‘Hard Brexit’ will lead to “the economy falling off a cliff” could have easily spared a moment to sign a letter that seeks to guide her party’s position on something that will ultimately affect all of her constituents. We join those expressing disappointment in Emma Dent Coad.
Emma Dent Coad’s supposed position on Brexit as set out during the 2017 General Election campaign
The letter sent by Labour heavyweights to The Guardian in full follows:
Jeremy Corbyn has rightly said that Labour’s position on Brexit is to focus on a deal that prioritises jobs first. We are all united behind that goal. For us that means membership of the single market. A country can be a member of the single market without being a member of the EU and we must be clear – “access” to the European single market is both different and inferior to “membership” of the single market. Why? Because if we leave the single market, whatever the level of access is negotiated, working people across Britain will be worse off and revenue to the exchequer will plummet – revenue the next Labour government will need to bring an end to years of damaging Tory austerity.
The single market is not a simple free trade zone. It is, uniquely, a framework of rules that protects people from the worst excesses of globalisation and unfettered capitalism, in addition to easing trade across the continent. If we have mere access to the single market, we are talking about leaving this framework of rules and achieving mere reductions in tariffs for trade with the European Union.
If Britain stays in the single market, we will continue to benefit from EU laws and court judgments that outlaw discrimination in the workplace; deliver vital rights to workers on holiday pay, maternity and paternity leave, the right to join a union, and much more; protect our natural environment from pollution; and keep workers safe through stringent health and safety requirements. Large multinational companies work across borders to maximise their profits to often reduce these protections; the next Labour government, as a member of the single market, can work with other European countries to resist this and advance social justice. If we leave the single market, and ask for mere “access”, we will be compromised in achieving these goals.
This is why so many people in the Labour movement are supporting British membership of the single market after Brexit. Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has said that “if we leave the single market, working people will end up paying the price. It’d be bad for jobs, for work rights and for our living standards.” The USDAW trade union has warned that leaving the single market “will put at risk hundreds of thousands of jobs”.
And who is leading the charge to junk our membership of the single market? A motley crew of hard-right, pro-Brexit Tories. Michael Gove. Boris Johnson. John Redwood. Iain Duncan Smith. Priti Patel. Theresa May wants us out because her government is totally dominated by its obsession with leaving the single market. They want us to leave precisely because they want to roll back the social protections delivered by single market membership. Redwood authored a plan to cut regulation in Britain by 25%. Patel went one further, calling on the “burden” of EU regulations – those rules that protect working people – to be “halved”. We should not be providing political cover to hard-right Tories who stand diametrically opposed to Labour values.
The argument for leaving the single market is often focused around the need to end the free movement of people. However, we argue, and many experts agree, that changes to our immigration system can be made while keeping us inside it. Within the European treaties, free movement is not unconditional – at the moment we can require EU citizens to leave if they have no job or a prospect of a job three months after their arrival. Restrictions on free movement are explicitly allowed for reasons of “public policy, public security or public health”. Liechtenstein, which is outside the EU but in the single market, perfectly legally imposes quotas on EU migrants. French president Emmanuel Macron’s chief adviser has floated the idea of a “continental partnership” between Britain and the EU that would allow us to restrict free movement.
Another reason often cited for not remaining a member of the single market is that the state aid rules that apply in it stop governments from pursuing active industrial strategies to support their industries. But these have not stopped the likes of Germany having a national investment bank or France and the Netherlands supporting their industries through government procurement spend.
Ultimately, leaving the single market will make it much harder for a Labour government to end these years of Tory austerity. The economic damage it would cause would reduce the tax take, meaning less money could be spent on public services. The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies has forecast that leaving the single market for a free trade agreement could cause a £31bn hit to the public finances, extending austerity even further.
To win next time, Labour must provide a strong opposition to the Tories, stand up for the values of our voters, and continue to fight for the interests of all – not least young people who have the most to lose from an extreme Tory Brexit and who voted for the first time in 2017 for Labour, thinking we would stop the Tories in their tracks. This has to mean fighting unambiguously for membership of the single market. At the very least we should strongly oppose May’s decision to take membership off the table in these negotiations. An ambitious and confident alternative government – with Corbyn at the helm – should not throw in the towel as May has done, but could seek membership with reforms on immigration and the other matters we seek.
Chuka Umunna MP, Phil Wilson MP, Madeleine Moon MP, Maria Eagle MP, Liz Kendall MP, Stella Creasy MP, Wes Streeting MP, Mike Gapes MP, Kate Green MP, Lord Michael Cashman, Anne Coffey MP, Ian Murray MP, Rushanara Ali MP, Karen Buck MP, Stephen Doughty MP, Stephen Timms MP, Lord Spencer Livermore, Catherine McKinnell MP, Lord Peter Hain, Tulip Siddiq MP, Peter Kyle MP, Ruth Cadbury MP, Bridget Phillipson MP, Pat McFadden MP, Ann Clwyd MP, Thangam Debbonaire MP, Chris Bryant MP, Andy Slaughter MP, Daniel Zeichner MP, Alison McGovern MP, Darren Jones MP, Kerry McCarthy MP, Ben Bradshaw MP, Clare Moody MEP, Seb Dance MEP, Luciana Berger MP, Lord George Foulkes, Catherine Stihler MEP, David Martin MEP, Jude Kirton-Darling MEP, Mary Honeyball MEP, Paul Brannen MEP, Richard Corbett MEP, Julie Ward MEP, Derek Vaughan MEP, Lucy Anderson MEP, David Lammy MP, Lord John Monks, Meg Hillier MP, Adrian Bailey MP and Lady Meta Ramsay
A stunning example of Eileen Gray’s work, an 
Eileen Gray also designed the 
The E-1027 table was designed for the eponymous house in 1927.
