by Terry Lovell
A more successful effort to set the record straight occurred in April 2002 when Ward contacted Philip Webster, political editor of The Times. It resulted in a lengthy feature explaining at length that Ecclestone’s donation had been motivated by personal tax benefits alone and not in return for an exemption for Formula One from the proposed European directive. But why had it taken more than four years to set the record straight? Because, explained Mosley, Downing Street refused to do so despite repeated reassurances. In the meantime, over the next two or three years, when the Government became mired in further cash-for-favours allegations, the media would invariably refer to Ecclestone’s £1 million donation, tainting him each time by association. He became incensed each time his name was linked to another headline on political corruption. That he and Ward would go to the newspapers if Downing Street did not absolve Ecclestone was made clear to Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson. An intermediary, added Mosley, even went to see Blair ‘and we got the same response: “I think it’s monstrous what happened to Bernie. He shouldn’t have got the blame for this. It wasn’t his fault … he didn’t bribe anybody.” But they never actually went out of their way to put it right.’ It was finally decided, ‘fairly reluctantly’, to follow through with their threat.
Former Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, a genuine Formula One fan who became chairman of British American Racing, described Ecclestone as ‘a fun, exciting, unpredictable pocket dynamo’, and this long-running drama was not the first time Ecclestone had been associated with the financial fortunes of a political party. In October 2000 a leak from a senior source within the Conservative Party claimed that he had helped to raise a total of between £600,000 and £700,000 for the party’s 1997 pre-election war chest through personal donations from him and business contacts.
Whatever Ecclestone’s relationship with the then Prime Minister John Major, whose party was ousted from power by Blair and his New Labour Party, Ecclestone enjoyed the social favour of Margaret Thatcher, a woman whose no-nonsense chatelaine style he would have found much more appealing. He was among five motor sport figures invited to a gathering of the great and the good at Downing Street on the night before Mark Thatcher’s wedding on 14 February 1987. In addition to Ecclestone, they included well-connected Formula Three driver Charlie Crichton-Stewart, the then Brands Hatch boss John Webb, and Michael Tee, chairman of CSS International, a sports promotion company which was handling Mark Thatcher’s short-lived career in motor sport. During the course of the evening Ecclestone was seen in deep conversation with two other distinguished guests, Lord Hanson and the late Lord White, partners in a business empire ranging from tobacco and chemicals to energy and coal and worth nearly £11 billion. Led by Maggie Thatcher, the three disappeared with her into a side room, to emerge about ten minutes later and rejoin the other guests.
Thatcher was not known for her love or support of Formula One, but, nevertheless, she was prepared to give it her invaluable endorsement by attending an ultra-extravagant bash staged at London’s Albert Hall in February 1981 by the Monaco-based Essex Overseas Petroleum Corporation, the sponsors of the Lotus team, to unveil the new Essex Lotus 86. It was a £1.1-million affair for 900 guests, including many senior figures in the oil industry. According to one of the organisers, Thatcher used the occasion for a discreet meeting with two ‘ultra-rich’ businessmen. ‘There were two oilmen she wanted to meet and who wanted to meet her, and it couldn’t be done openly,’ says the organiser. ‘There were wheels within wheels. Even though I was running the party I had no idea what was going on.’ Before she left, Thatcher apparently took the opportunity to express her admiration of Ecclestone’s shrewdness. Brabham team manager Herbie Blash, one of a number introduced to her, said: ‘Bernie’s name came up and she said to a colleague she was very pleased that Bernie was not involved in politics.’
Nearly two-and-a-half years after the European Union directive banning tobacco advertising and sponsorship was introduced, after all the enormous costs politically and commercially involved, it was ruled to be contrary, as Mosley and Ward had claimed, to one of its own laws. In October 2000, following a legal challenge by Germany and cigarette manufacturers, the European Court of Justice overturned the directive on the grounds that it was unlawful: the harmonisation of laws to improve public health is expressly excluded by the European Union Treaty. In response, the European Union’s Health Commissioner, David Byrne, announced that Brussels would introduce new measures to prohibit ‘pernicious’ tobacco advertising and sponsorship. The European Court of Justice added that its ruling did not prohibit individual member states from introducing their own legislation, a move which the British Government said, through public health minister, Yvette Cooper, it intended to pursue.
In December 2000 the Government published a bill to ban tobacco advertising and promotion, but got no further for lack of parliamentary time. In July 2001 an identical Private Member’s Bill, tabled by a Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Clement Jones, was introduced in the House of Lords and subsequently supported and adopted by the Government. It was expected to become law in October 2002. It was precisely, claimed Mosley, what he had petitioned in the first place. News of the Private Member’s Bill prompted him to pen a letter to Health Secretary Alan Milburn giving the FIA’s support – and impishly wishing the government ‘third time lucky’.
David Ward believed the Government’s central mistake was not merely in the handling of Ecclestone’s £1 million donation but, more seriously, in ‘its ineptness and naïvety in failing to understand the issues. They not only caused themselves enormous embarrassment, but also blew up their own policy [domestic tobacco legislation]. It was all so crazy and so wholly avoidable.’
Notes
1. Sunday Express, 8 October 2000.
2. Department of Health White Paper ‘Smoking Kills’, December 1998.
18
MARRIAGE, MONEY AND BLACKMAIL
Bernie Ecclestone’s marriage to a beautiful model 28 years his junior attracted the inevitable cynical comments. No, he responds with his usual candour, she did not marry him for his money. What is more, he insists, when they met she did not even know how much he was worth. Slavica, with similar candour, admits she had been interested in older men, caused, she believed, by the emotional trauma of her father abandoning her family when she was seven years old. She had, she supposed, been looking for a father figure. Certainly, as part of the chemistry of their mutual attraction, what they had in common were childhoods that, while culturally poles apart, were not so different economically. Indeed, Slavica’s early years were profoundly more desperate than her husband’s.
She was born Slavica Radic on 25 May 1958 in a sparsely furnished cellar apartment of a house in the old part of the Croatian port town of Rijeka on the Adriatic coast, a squalid low-life area characterised by poverty, violence, drunkenness and prostitution. The departure of her dock-worker father, Jovan, in the early sixties led to divorce, after which Slavica’s mother, Ljubica, took her and her three brothers (Slavica was the second-eldest child) to live on the outskirts of the town. So impoverished were they, Slavica claimed, that she was ten years old before she was bought her first pair of shoes. From such surroundings emerged a wilful and troubled personality who consistently truanted and, at the age of 14, frequented the bar of one of the town’s seedier hotels.
Caught, with two friends, stealing a pair of sandals from a shop, Slavica was considered by a court to be beyond her mother’s control and sent to an institution for problem girls. She was released shortly before her 18th birthday, when she was encouraged to pursue a modelling career by signing up with a local model agency. This led to little, if any, work other than a series of nude photographs which were published in a Playboy-style magazine called Start.
It wasn’t until she decided to move to Milan in 1981 that Slavica’s fortunes began to change. She joined the fashion house Armani and dived into the social life she craved. On one notable occasion this led her to the
paddock of the Monza Grand Prix, where, by way of introduction, Ecclestone is said to have offered her a Coca-Cola.
Nowadays, with magnificent family homes in Corsica, Gstaad and the French Riviera readily accessible in one of her husband’s two private jets hangared at the airfield he owns in Biggin Hill, Kent, and a £20-million yacht in which to reflect on the days of her childhood, the least of Slavica’s worries is where her next pair of shoes will be coming from. She wears the kind of baubles that in July 1996 attracted the interest of muggers who pulled a £600,000 diamond ring from her finger shortly after the couple stepped out of their Bentley outside their home in Chelsea. Ecclestone, who suffered a broken nose, was kicked while on the ground. ‘My wife thought I was dead. It was all so unnecessary. I was not putting up a fight.’1
But the years that followed their wedding, at Kensington and Chelsea Register Office in 1985, saw many a scrap due to a workaholic schedule that permitted little, if any, accommodation for affairs of the family or home. Ecclestone firmly believes that a woman’s place is either in the kitchen or in the wrong, an attitude which, combined with his manic workload, created inevitable tension in a relationship already under some strain due to a clash of strong and independent wills
During an interview in the kitchen of the Ecclestones’ £10-million Chelsea home, Slavica held centre stage as, sipping white wine and smoking long, cheroot-style cigarettes, she loudly gave vent to her exasperation at her husband’s preference for his office over his home. She angrily recalled the fact that her wedding day merited, in Ecclestone’s estimation, neither a photographer nor a honeymoon. ‘Can you imagine that?’ she fumed. ‘He don’t care!’
During this tirade of criticism, Ecclestone sat mutely by, his face displaying a hint of amusement, as she then set about highlighting his social shortcomings to illustrate the disparity of their cultural interests. They included a disastrous African safari, which, amazingly (he loathes any form of holiday), she had persuaded him take, and a trip to China. There, she took in the tourist sights while he met government mandarins and the management of the $240-million Shanghai International Circuit to discuss the launch of a Chinese Grand Prix, which led in 2002 to an announcement that the circuit management had signed a seven-year contract to a host a grand prix beginning on 26 September 2004.
One of the tourist spots Slavica was keen to visit was the Great Wall. With great reluctance, she said, Ecclestone agreed to accompany her. But he was left singularly unimpressed by the military fortification, whose origin goes back to the fifth century and stretches for a distance of 4,160 miles, from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Nur in the west. After Slavica had finished angrily expressing her disappointment in his disinterest, I asked Ecclestone what he thought of the Great Wall. ‘Bloody long!’ he replied. He seemed unaffected by Slavica’s public criticisms. When she left the room after letting rip at him, he simply smiled, flattening a hand that he held over his head in a chopping motion, signalling that whatever she said, it all went over his head.
Such was the difference in their interests it was possible for even a visit to the movies to provoke a clash. Slavica, again with her husband within sight and sound, told of the night when they set off to a local cinema – until, that is, Ecclestone learned en route that it was a foreign film with sub-titles. He refused to go any further. ‘That is the kind of man he is,’ she proclaimed loudly. ‘He has no taste,’ And that, as she saw it, was a major problem in their relationship. She is Chelsea art-house; he is The Wild Bunch. She is Pucci and Terry de Havilland shoes; he is Marks & Spencer and any shoes that fit.
To the observer, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that their marriage was a classic demonstration of how the chairman’s power in the boardroom does not necessarily prevail in the living room; how a ruthless, driven figure such as Ecclestone, who numbers rulers and royals on his Christmas card list, who has brought hard-headed businessmen quaking to their knees, of whom tough team bosses have walked in fear, was capable of such timorous deference in the presence of an aggressively feisty mother of his children. Certainly, he was the boss in his office, and, certainly, she was the boss in the home, with a controlling influence in not only how they lived but where they lived.
It was Slavica who called the shots after Ecclestone fell in love with a house overlooking Kensington Palace. He bought the spectacular 55,000-sq-ft property for £50 million in October 2001, making it at the time the most expensive private home in Britain. British-Iranian billionaire property developer David Khalili, who was credited with a fortune of £5,800 million in the Sunday Times Rich List 2007, had spent £84 million in restoring and refurbishing the mansion, which had previously housed both the Russian and Egyptian embassies.
Marble was imported from a quarry in Agra, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India – the same quarry that supplied the marble for the Taj Mahal – for the construction of pillars surrounding a swimming pool, which were then inlaid with precious stones. It also boasted eight lavishly furnished suites, a ballroom, Turkish bath and hairdressing salon. A private underground car park was also installed, accommodating twenty cars. Deploying up to 400 craftsmen, it was said to have been only second in cost to the refurbishment of Windsor Castle.
Khalili expected to sell the mansion for as much as £110 million. But, at that price, there were no takers. It stood empty for several years, until Ecclestone persuaded Khalili to slash the price to £50 million. However, Slavica did not share his love for the mansion. She refused to move – but Ecclestone went ahead with its purchase as a property investment. Three years later, he sold it for £57 million to Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who topped the Sunday Times Rich List in 2008 with a fortune of £27.7 billion.
Over the years, the volatile chemistry of their powerful personalities has forced them ever further apart, with a deep and protective love for their daughters, Tamara and Petra, their only bond. But even that gradually began to unfasten as the girls grew up and moved away from the family home.
The Ecclestones’ marriage had effectively come to an end years before, and Slavica formally moved to end it while Ecclestone was away at the Brazilian Grand Prix in São Paulo in October 2008. She packed her bags and moved out of their home and into a Chelsea riverside apartment owned by Petra’s wealthy bachelor boyfriend, 27-year-old James Stunt. The news was broken to Ecclestone in a call from a journalist.
As the newspapers rolled off the presses, Ecclestone claimed to know nothing of his wife’s departure. Uncertain of what was going on, he made light of her absence from the family home, blaming it on noise caused by neighbouring building work. It was a somewhat sad denial of a situation that he had difficulty in acknowledging. Two months later, while Slavica was talking to top London lawyer Liz Vernon – who won a landmark divorce settlement for the wife of Arsenal footballer Ray Parlour, which obliged him to pay a huge lump sum and a third of his future earnings for four years – Ecclestone was still insisting that his marriage was secure.
At Mousaieff, in Mayfair’s New Bond Street, where Ecclestone was helping to publicise the announcement that Tamara, 24, was to be the new ‘face’ of the boutique jeweller, he stated firmly: ‘We are not going to get a divorce.’2 Slavica, he added, was travelling with friends in India ‘but when she gets back we’re going to talk things through’. The family were busy discussing where to spend Christmas, he revealed. ‘I think we are going to be in Gstaad, but we’re a democratic family, so I’ll let the girls choose.’ The couple did indeed get back together for the festive season, but it was short lived.
On 11 March 2009, at the Principal Registry of the High Court’s Family Division, Slavica was granted a decree nisi by Judge Berry on the grounds of Ecclestone’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’, which he did not contest and for which he agreed to pay all legal costs. In just fifty-eight seconds, their marriage of nearly twenty-four years came to an end. In a total of twenty-nine petitions, filed the previous September, it was claimed that his behaviour caused her ‘stress and anxi
ety,’ due, it was believed, to his workaholic lifestyle.
Judge Berry said that the marriage had ‘broken down irretrievably’ as a result of Ecclestone having ‘behaved in such a way that the petitioner cannot reasonably be expected to live with the respondent’. As with Slavica’s plans to leave him, Ecclestone was again caught napping. ‘I did not know anything about it [the hearing],’ he said. ‘The lawyers said they had received the information late last night but I didn’t know it had gone through. I didn’t have a clue about the hearing. I suppose for the family, it’s a sad day. Some things are inevitable.’3
Yet, even then, he embraced the hope that their relationship was not over: ‘Who knows? Maybe after she has thought about it, we can get back together,’ he said a few days later. ‘In fact, I see no reason at all why we shouldn’t even get married again. Other divorced people have – why can’t we? Everyone who knows Slavica knows there is a crazy side to her, but it’s the reason I love her. I thought I would be with her until my nineties.’4
But everyone who knows Slavica would also know that a happy reunion is highly unlikely. She is a proud and independent woman who believes that she has fulfilled her marital duties, as keeper of Ecclestone’s home and mother of his children, and at the age of 50 was both young and wealthy enough to start life anew.
How big a slice she will enjoy of his £2.4-billion fortune was, at the time of writing, still be agreed, but it was predicted that she might be in line for as much as £1 billion in a fight that, according to legal sources, could drag on for twelve months. In Ecclestone’s corner was Lady Helen Ward, the wife of Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Ward, who married her a year after divorcing his first wife in 1982. A powerful and pugnacious attorney, she is, like Ecclestone, a workaholic, and charges £500 an hour for her services. She won a divorce payout of £48 million – a British record – in 2008 for Beverly Charman, the former wife of insurance millionaire John Charman.