Cherie is also helping her second son, Nicky, develop a sports-management business called Magnitude. She has taken a 20 per cent stake in the company and is a director, and management meetings are held at the Blairs’ Buckinghamshire home. Nicky has a desk and dedicated phone line at the Omnia Strategy headquarters, which is in what we have affectionately termed the Blair Tower, and the Blair Tower is the business address.
Magnitude is a so-called ‘e-sports business’, which manages teams competing on computer games online for prize money. The firm posted an £8,200 loss and according to its accounts, is almost £17,000 in the red. Nicky owns 40 per cent of the business and another 40 per cent is owned by his business partner Gabriel Moraes.
The company came under scrutiny from Westminster Council after Nicky moved it from his home to his mother’s office – and there was concern that Cherie Blair might be breaking council-tax rules by using an office for her two charities and allowing a commercial undertaking to be based there; she gets an 80 per cent discount on business rates because she runs charities.
But the phone line and desk were found by visiting Westminster Council officials to be in Omnia Strategy’s offices, which paid full business rates for the area they occupied.
A council spokesman confirmed that Mrs Blair’s offices, next to Hyde Park in Central London, had been the subject of an unannounced check by officers, who found the space was occupied by three different entities – the two charities and Omnia. Westminster Council decided not to take any further action.
It began as a limited company and in 2013 was turned into a partnership. The last public files at the end of 2012 show that the limited company was dissolved and the directors state that they can cover all their debts. But it meant the end of the gaming business. The decision meant that it no longer filed full accounts with Companies House.
Cherie Blair takes an active interest in the new business, managing foreign football players, which has now been rebranded with an office in Rio in Brazil. Cherie took time out of her busy schedule to meet an unknown Mexican footballer, then seventeen-year-old prodigy Raúl Mendiola, in a Los Angeles hotel. Mendiola is signed to Magnitude, which is acting as his football agent.
So, according to an article in the Mirror, are a number of promising Brazilian stars.9 It reported: “Magnitude Brazil Sports Ltd opened its office in a glass and marble-fronted skyscraper in Rio in 2011 … It now exists solely in South America.’
Over the past two years, Blair and Moraes, with their South American business partners Rafael Fraga and Vinicius Marques, have been signing up talent from Brazil’s biggest clubs. Highly rated players with Magnitude include defender Marlon Santos da Silva Barbosa, 18, who plays for Fluminense, and midfielder Leandro Alves de Carvalho, 17, of Botafogo.
Magnitude Brazil are also said to have an arrangement with Desportivo Brasil, a Sao Paulo club which develops players for top sides.
Effectively Nicky is now working outside the UK with a business solely based in South America and no longer regularly scrutinized in the British media. He is predicted to do very well with his new talent when Brazil and Mexico take part in the World Cup in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022.
Kathryn Blair, who is a barrister, is the one person who has not set up her own business. But she has some musical talent; when she showed some musical curiosity in the early 2000s, Alastair Campbell was asked to contact Chappells, the musical instrument suppliers, to track down a suitable instrument for the PM’s daughter.
Campbell suggested to the head of piano sales that the company might care to donate a baby grand piano worth several thousands of pounds to the PM’s family. The head of piano sales dismissed the call, telling Campbell in no uncertain terms that he could come in and buy a piano like everyone else, and put the phone down.
Shortly afterwards, a piano tuner was summoned to Number 10 to tune an old German baby grand made by the firm Steck. He understood this had been given to the PM’s family by David Putnam, the well-known film producer and friend of the family. According to the piano tuner, the instrument was in a ‘terrible condition’ and needed three visits to sort out and bring to a serviceable state. Nothing further is known about Kathryn’s musical talent but the baby of the family, Leo, had a part in English National Opera’s production of The Magic Flute in November 20 at the age of 13.
While Cherie’s empire cannot be compared to Tony’s worldwide money-making in either scale or content, it does exhibit a similar determination to maximise her wealth by every means possible. There is now far less emphasis on her campaigns for human rights, and much more on her determination to make money from private health and private security. Just like Tony, she has good connections with billionaires, and her sons, Nicky and Euan, are budding entrepreneurs. Both Cherie and Euan look set to benefit enormously from the further privatisation of public services and the NHS.
Notes
1 Daily Mail, 30 October 2010: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
1324985/Cherie-Blairs-father-Tony-reveals-
doesnt-love-daughter-Lauren-Booth.html
2 http://freetown.usembassy.gov/usaid.html
3 Financial Times, 30 March 2012: http://www.ft.com/cms/s
/0/dff5c3a0-7a63-11e1-839f-
00144feab49a.html#axzz3CjApK9Gr
4 http://thewilberforcesociety.co.uk/proposed-constitutional-
framework-for-the-republic-of-tunisia/
5 The Sunday Times, 5 February 2012: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/
sto/news/uk_news/People/article867909.ece
6 www.hrw.org, 1 September 2014: http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/
09/01/dispatches-time-stand-bahrain-s-dissidents
7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bOeLWxL87M
8 www.order-order.com, 22 September 2012
9 Daily Mirror, 14 June 2014: http://www.mirror.co.uk/
sport/football/news/tony-blairs-son-nicky-set-3695781
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE PROPERTY PORTFOLIO
We took out a mortgage the size of Mount Snowdon.’
– CHERIE BLAIR IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHY SPEAKING FOR MYSELF.
Tony and Cherie Blair have created a property empire for themselves and their immediate family that replicates his lifestyle when he was Prime Minister. His central hub in London’s Connaught Square is an even more luxurious version of No. 10, including a mews house for an office and security protection. Their Grade I-listed country pile, South Pavilion in Buckinghamshire, is the equivalent of Chequers – down to having a modern sports pavilion and tennis courts.
Their offices at Marble Arch Towers and Cherie’s and Euan’s offices at 1 Cumberland Place are the equivalent of Whitehall ministries and departments.
The entire family are also colonising Marylebone in multimillion-pound properties, each within easy walking distance. And one of Blair’s closest confidants, Lord Mandelson, lives within walking distance in Regents Park, alongside his former bag carrier, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, who has a house a few hundred yards from Blair’s HQ at Connaught Square.
The property empire of Tony and Cherie Blair and their immediate family is nothing if not extensive. The Blairs now own a staggering thirty-six properties – including two blocks of flats – worth tens of millions of pounds. Thirty-one are in the UK, and another five are abroad. They buy their children expensive homes and their relations more modest properties.
Nothing is too grand for the Blairs. As well as buying the homes they have also spent a fortune modernising, extending and adapting them and landscaping their gardens to meet their tastes.
Tony and Cherie seem never to have got over the time he was Prime Minister and he could entertain in Chequers and live in Downing Street. ‘He runs his office like No. 10, with ladies keeping his diary,’ says a former staffer. When interviewing prospective staff, he is normally dressed in jeans, drinking coffee from a Starbucks cup.
It was not always like this. Until Tony Blair became PM their lifestyle was comfortable rather than grand
. They first lived in an up-and-coming area of Hackney called Mapledene. This was Hackney’s equivalent of a poor man’s Islington – a convenient berth for thrusting middle-class professionals such as lawyers and journalists who didn’t want to commute to work from the boring suburbs. They bought up neglected but rather fine-looking properties that would go for a fortune in Chelsea but went for a comparative song because of their location in rundown Hackney.
As they became more prosperous they moved to the more fashionable and expensive Islington, and, once Blair became MP for the safe Labour seat of Sedgefield, they purchased a modest but scruffy property, Myrobella in Trimdon for £30,000 in 1983 as a constituency home. They also purchased two flats for Euan Blair in Bristol in 2002 in a very controversial deal through a blind trust advised by Peter Foster, an Australian conman. They paid £525,000 for both and sold one in 2008 for £260,000. The second is still owned by Cherie Blair and has no mortgage but can be rented out for at least £1,200 a month. They originally had a mortgage costing £2,000 a month for both flats but derived a rental income of £2,400 a month when the Blairs owned both.
The turning point for the Blairs, once they had acquired the taste for more gracious millionaire-style living, took place in 2004 when they purchased 29 Connaught Square – and the transition to the private lifestyle of the billionaire jet set when he left office in 2007.
CONNAUGHT SQUARE
The purchase of Connaught Square certainly stretched their pockets at the time and the PM’s salary was lower than the deposit. The cost was an eye-watering £3.65 million and they had a deposit of only £182,500, relying on a 95 per cent mortgage of £3,467,500 from the Cheltenham and Gloucester (now part of state-owned Lloyds) over twenty-five years.
Cherie said her in memoirs, Speaking for Myself, that they took out a mortgage ‘the size of Mount Snowdon’, adding, ‘Yes that was very scary. Particularly since I was the person who had to support it. Because whatever else happened, we had to meet the monthly payment and it was down to me. Because no one else was going to meet it, were they?’
At the time there was speculation that the Blairs had overpaid, but, with an estimated value at the time of writing of over £8.3 million1 in the present property boom, no one is going to say that now.
The Blairs bought the property from wealthy art historian Roger Bevan, who had led a residents’ campaign to buy the freehold of the property and others in the square from the Church Commissioners. The Old Etonian and Cambridge graduate also encouraged the residents to restore the square and reinstate the original railings, which had been destroyed by an IRA bomb attack in the seventies.
The Blairs had different ideas, which became very clear when they also purchased a small mews cottage at the back of the square, 5 Archery Close, for between £600,000 and £800,000 in February 2007 with a mortgage from Lloyds TSB.
The mortgage was discharged by 2008 – showing the Blairs’ change in fortunes – and the former PM bought the freehold so he owned both properties.
What happened next, as the Daily Mail reported in June 2007,2 was to cause consternation with the neighbours and has never really been resolved. The Mail said a
huge tarpaulin covers scaffolding used by workmen linking the three-storey house with a mews cottage.
The entire rear of the Grade II listed building, which the Blairs bought in 2004 for £3.6 million, has been ripped off so the two houses can be joined, providing a massive living area for the former Prime Minister and his family.
A bulging skip stands outside, and the west side of the square is now little more than an eyesore. A vast new kitchen is being built, as well as accommodation for security staff and a suite of offices from which Mr Blair will run his new career. There will also be a sun terrace and four solar panels to provide green energy …
The once-peaceful square, just north of Hyde Park, has never seen anything like it. Tony and Cherie recently attended a residents’ garden party to try to soothe ruffled feelings, but there is still resentment at the disruption the new neighbours are causing.
Police have drawn up plans to seal off the area in the event of demonstrations and have asked residents to consider carrying utility bills to prove their identity to officers manning security cordons around the square.
A petition circulated among residents has suggested that to protect the Blairs, part of the square could be turned into ‘a gated community policed by armed guards [with] a police helicopter hovering above’. It added that, if the risk to the family was so great, they should not be living in a residential square.
A community police officer told worried neighbours last week: ‘We are in a new situation and we are not going to know how it will affect everyone until the family is here.’
The reason cited for all these changes was that the Blairs claimed that MI5 and Special Branch told them it would make their main home safer. Panic alarms, motion detectors and CCTV cameras were fitted as part of an extensive security system. The mews house was also thought to be used as a nanny flat.
The project was overseen by one of Cherie Blair’s close confidants Martha Greene, an American restaurateur and film producer, who seems to have taken over the role once performed by Carole Caplin in Downing Street, when Blair was PM, as an adviser to Cherie.
Greene came to Britain from America in the 1980s and joined Saatchi & Saatchi, rising from ‘gofer’ to apprentice producer in just three years. In 1990 – the year her first marriage to sound engineer Robin Saunders ended – she set up the independent production company Stark Films.
One of her most notable successes in a wide-ranging career was taking over the popular upmarket Villandry restaurant in Great Portland Street.
She seems to be a very feisty character and was highly praised by people in the advertising industry. Tim Mellors, now president and chief creative officer of the agency Grey Worldwide North America, provides a graphic description of her presence of mind when producing a film for BP in Martinique when everything went wrong. In a blog3 he described the situation:
There are times when doing a runner is the wisest call a producer can make. On a BP underwater shoot in Martinique, some of the crew turned out to be inter-island drug runners making a bit of spare cash. They were authentic badasses, and although they didn’t like us, they really hated the gay French art director. So much so that they chopped the head off his Old English Sheepdog to teach him a lesson. Feisty Martha went up to them to remonstrate and they replied by (literally) taking a crap in her handbag.
Within 20 minutes Ms Greene had us on a light plane out of there. I remember making a mental note: when the shit really hits the fan (or the handbag), make sure you have a good producer.
An article in the Daily Mail4 in 2006 describes her as ‘the sensibly attired New Yorker who has, with measured steps, effectively replaced Carole Caplin in Cherie’s affections and confidence.’
According to the article, so close was she to the Blairs that when she split with her former partner Ivan Ruggeri, a former Italian tour operator, she engaged a high-flying family lawyer, Maggie Rae, to thrash out the acrimonious details of their separation.
According to the Mail, ‘Key among her demands is a confidentiality agreement under which Ruggeri promises not to divulge any of the details of their relationship, or anything she may have told him about her friendship and business dealings with the Blairs.’
Her new partner would also have been useful to the Blairs. He is Jonathan Metliss, a corporate lawyer, a Tory donor, a member of the Westminster Conservative Association and on the executive of the campaign group Conservative Friends of Israel. His entry in Debrett’s People of Today shows extensive links with Israel. On 7 September 2010 the annual publication listed him not just as a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, but also as an executive of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, a joint secretary and executive member of the Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism and a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism (which per
haps should refer to the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism).
Debrett’s also lists Metliss as a member of the executive of the Israeli British Business Council, a director and member of the executive of the British–Israel Chamber of Commerce, a director of the Weizmann Institute Foundation and a vice-chairman of the Friends of the Weizmann Institute (UK) – the last two of which are connected to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel – a chairman of the British Friends of Haifa University and a member of the Advisory Board of Tel Aviv University Business School and the Board of Governors of Haifa University.
Greene seems to have been involved in brokering the deal to buy Connaught Square while Tony and Cherie were still in Downing Street, and, according to people living in the square, her reward was the use of the building for offices while she was in London.
According to the Mail she also gave Cherie other advice. ‘When Cherie doubted the wisdom of giving her first solo television interview, it was Greene who convinced her that going on Richard [&] Judy was a splendid idea.’
And, when Cherie wanted to boost her fitness regime, it was Greene’s advice that led her to train with Steve Agyei – himself a former protégé of Carole Caplin.
On a lecture tour in 2005 it was Greene who flew first-class to Dubai with Cherie and stayed in adjoining hotel rooms. Press coverage was, according to Greene, a necessary evil: ‘If we could exclude [the British press] we would.’
She also organised the domain name for Cherie Blair’s charitable foundation and organised the catering for the Blairs’ twentieth-wedding-anniversary meal.
SOUTH PAVILION
Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask Page 33