ROMAN ABRAMOVICH’S ex-wife Irina gave her multi-millionaire downstairs neighbour Amanda Cronin £25,000 in cash — after her builders burst a pipe and ruined Cronin’s Fendi and Chanel jacket collection. “I was devastated, but Irina offered £25,000 to pacify me,” says ACC skincare mogul Cronin, above, adding: “The collection was worth way more than that, at least £100,000, but I didn’t want to fight her, so I accepted her offer and then decided to move out altogether to escape her builders.”
Irina, who was married to the Russian billionaire for 16 years and has five children with him, had been working on the second-floor Belgravia property above Cronin.
But during the pandemic, it all got too much. “The noise was too bad, especially when I was trying to do my daily yoga sessions — my stress levels definitely increased”. It’s a tough life for the brides of Belgravia.
Garvey: I’m over my royal crush
JANE GARVEY says she and podcast partner Fi Glover are “quicker to react to stuff now” after admitting she joked about her youthful crush on Prince Andrew for too long. “We knew about Prince Andrew then [in 2017] and I was still thinking it was okay to make these sorts of remarks,” Garvey told an audience at the British Library. She was speaking at an event for her and Glover’s book Did I Say That? She did, though, explain the origin of her infatuation: “For about six months, Prince Andrew was really attractive in the late Seventies”. A different world.
‘My Biennale first has taken too long’
The first black female artist to occupy Britain’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, London-born Sonia Boyce, says “it’s shocking in 2022 to be the first”. Multimedia artist Boyce, who has been working since the Eighties, went on: “I shouldn’t be the first and it shouldn’t seem like a massive step.” Boyce also added to the Art Newspaper: “The thing that undercuts the accolade of being the first is a sense that somehow I’m out of place… what’s being said underneath is, ‘oh, we weren’t expecting you’.”
SW1A
AS MPs at Westminster waited with bated breath to see who would be the first Cabinet minister to break silence over Johnson and Sunak’s fines, the honour went to Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis. He trilled on Twitter: “Season 3 of #DerryGirls is out today!” Ah yes, the biggest issue of the day.
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One Tory MP hits out obliquely at his colleague Michael Fabricant for excusing the PM’s lockdown fine by claiming nurses and teachers had staff room drinks “after a very long shift”. Simon Hoare thundered: “Whataboutery is bad enough but unsubstantiated offensive whataboutery can go hang.”
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THE Soho Revue hosted a private view of “Art on a Postcard” curated by heiress India Rose James for Choose Love’s Ukrainian appeal last night. Conceptual artist Imogen Buckley was there, but one postcard left the Londoner blushing —a frog about to lunge from a breast disguised as a lily pad. At the Curzon, the premiere of Operation Mincemeat drew its stars Colin Firth and Kelly Macdonald, with Claudia Winkleman and Eunice Olumide.
