When Hazel Settas took a job as housekeeper to a wealthy Tory MP, she evidently wasn’t ready for what she found.
Her instructions for running the former minister Jonathan Djanogly’s £7m home read more like the backstage rider of a particularly demanding pop diva than something out of Mrs Beeton. Rules on the management of avocados alone ran to 100 words, with a strict system of rotation between bowl and fridge to maintain ripeness (“check to see if there are eight soft avocados in the fridge … if not add up the missing number of soft avocados and put this number of hard avocados into the fruit bowl”). Phone calls were to be answered within four rings, and there were instructions on carrying items correctly from the coffee table to the sink. Settas, who lasted only a fortnight in the job, said she had to work until 10 or 11 at night to complete her tasks and that the MP’s wife, Rebecca Silk, allegedly shouted at her to “hurry up”; the housekeeper cried, she says, in her room at night.
