Londoner's Diary: After selling out the Goves are now selling up

Getty Images / Jack Taylor / Stringer
31 October 2016

Now that Michael Gove has become a persona non grata in the tree-lined streets of North Kensington after a series of unfortunate events this summer, he and his wife Sarah Vine are thinking of decamping.

Last week The Londoner heard that the Goves were on the hunt for a new home, and over the weekend the rumour was confirmed: their sizeable house in one of the less fashionable streets in North Kensington has been put up for sale with a local estate agent, a keen Brexiteer too, we’re told.

Prospective buyers may be attracted by the charming garden, bulging bookshelves and cosy decor of Moroccan rugs and stylish tiles. It’s also something of a bargain: the asking price for the three-bedroom house is £1.395 million. That’s only a few thousand more than the last time they put the house on the market in 2014, for £1.35 million. It was also on in 2012 for the same amount.

That’s a steal compared with smaller, two-bedroom houses in the area selling for the same price. A Nationwide building society online valuation suggests a house in the area worth £1.35 million in 2014 should now be worth closer to £1.7 million. Perhaps it’s the Brexit effect?

It’s not surprising the Goves want to make a quick exit: the family are a short walk from the Camerons’ house and a stone’s throw from the Osborne family seat in Westbourne Park. But where will they go?

Frenemies of the pair have offered two contrasting suggestions: West Kensington and Bayswater. Not exactly miles away from their old haunt but far enough away to avoid meeting a glowering David Cameron while buying a pint of milk.

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If Gove has his eye on a smaller property along the river, one potential candidate is firmly off the market. Earlier this year The Londoner reported that the elegant flat of the late George Weidenfeld, the legendary publisher, was up for sale for more than £9 million. It was the setting for many a glittering party and had become a landmark of the literary set. But despite this it had not attracted a buyer. Until now: a wealthy gentleman has sealed the deal after the asking price was slashed by £1 million. Weidenfeld’s widow, Lady Annabelle, has been living abroad since the spring. She may wish to return to get packing.

Another hairy moment for Peston

Last Sunday Robert Peston hit the headlines after going over the handlebars of his bike. Now he’s putting his face in the hands of viewers: before hosting Peston on Sunday yesterday he tweeted a picture of his newly moustachioed face and asked viewers to decide if it it should stay or go. “Love you so much but am not sharing a studio with that moustache,” his colleague Allegra Stratton tweeted. “You look like an extra from True Detective.”

Its fate is still undecided.

A ghoulish crawl in the city

No tricks and all treats this weekend, as The Londoner negotiated Halloween. On Saturday we were at 46 Berkeley Square — the site of the forthcoming reincarnation of Annabel’s — for a haunted bash. Ballet dancer Eric Underwood took to the floor and the Viscount and Viscountess of Weymouth embraced regal Gothic, while actress Olivia Grant - who posed with Matthew Williamson’s business director Rosanna Falconer - was scarily stylish. Come Sunday we dined on witch hat parfaits and corpse reviver cocktails at Covent Garden restaurant Balthazar, with model Amber Le Bon and Patrick Grant among the guests. The Londoner admits it was sheet-faced.

We wish you a bookish Christmas ...

Two competing stocking fillers for the holiday season, from under the same roof. Psychotherapist Susie Orbach is releasing In Therapy, a collection of her work from her Radio 4 programme of the same name. She dedicates the book to her novelist wife: “For Jeanette Winterson, who has always wanted to know what goes on in the consulting room.”

But how will the pair deal with a little rivalry? Winterson’s book Christmas Days, a collection of festive stories and musings, is also coming out, and she dedicates it to “the loved ones in my life who really can cook. My wife Susie Orbach and my friends Beeban Kidron and Nigella Lawson.”

One might assume Orbach’s consideration of psyche would win on the personal front but Winterson trumps her with a recipe for Susie’s Christmas Eve gravlax, the Nordic salmon dish, which she accompanies with an explanation of their courtship. “When we finally met in April 2009 we were both beginning again,” Winterson writes. “What we never expected was that we would begin again with each other. Love affairs are discoveries of new worlds. The worlds we discovered in each other were far away from our well-known geography. Not least, Susie had been happily heterosexual. And I wasn’t interested in doing further missionary work with straight women.”

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Darwin's law of natural selection predicts the survival of the fittest. The Times mentions this today in an article on a book by an American academic which argues that older pudgier fathers are more fetching than their younger rivals. Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus, the article notes, had such a prominent paunch that he had a hole cut in his table to fit his stomach. Survival of the fattest?

Hello, President Douglas

Michael Douglas took to the stage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane last night for a Q&A discussion with Jonathan Ross. As well as discussing the nuances of his colourful life in Hollywood, the actor reflected on the current presidential elections and on meeting the Clintons first back in 1996 at a state dinner for the French President Jacques Chirac. Douglas recounted: “I go through and there’s Mrs Clinton and Jacques Chirac and President Clinton standing there and I see him whispering to President Chirac. And then he [Bill] says, ‘You know, Michael, I’ve always wanted to do that’. I said ‘What?’ President Clinton said: ‘You stand here and I’ll stand here’. And then he got in line and said to me ‘Hello, Mr President’.”

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Brexit side-effect of the day: Typhoo teabags may be set for a price rise. As former campaign face Frankie Howerd might have said, “Oooooh.”

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