This townhouse, on the Upper East Side, is said to be the largest single-family home in New York.
It’s beautiful, built in the 1930s and belonged to Jeffery Epstein since the 1990s. It is about to be sold for $50 million.
In London a penthouse flat in this unbeautiful building is about to be sold for £110 million. It will cost £30 million to fit out as it’s a shell, making the ludicrous £200,000 estimate to tart up the Downing Street flat seem slightly less ludicrous. I know where I’d like to live and it’s not with the dodgy crowd that hang out in Candy Bros Towers or in Downing Street. The grossly inflated price for the penthouse leads me to suspect the buyer is repaying past favours or even perhaps doing a spot of money laundering, otherwise it makes no sense, but it’s another world; one I’m profoundly glad not to live in.
Also in The Times today is a beagle able to sniff Covid symptoms a week before they show up in tests and an obituary of a Covid casualty, owner of a blind rescue dog called Bertie Wooster, not a beagle so unable to give an early diagnosis.
Surprisingly a Major General hasn’t appeared in the dock at a court martial since 1815 when General Sir John Murray had that privilege. He seems to have been a poor soldier but was only nailed for abandoning his guns after the Battle of Tarragona in the Peninsular War. Now a retired Major General is accused of claiming £48,000 in school fees for his children to which it is claimed he was not entitled. (He didn’t send them to top-notch schools.) You may think this has no relevance to you but it does. The General was entitled to the allowance so long as he and his wife lived in a shoddy house in Putney with dull army wives as neighbours, allocated as part of his London posting. Sensibly the couple have a house in Dorset close to the children’s schools and, for convenience, his wife spent more time there than in the empty, dreary Putney place while her husband was working and the children at school.
How does the court know where she lived? She has been stitched up by her electronic footprint: ‘phone calls, texts, credit card statements, internet deliveries, etc. “The trial continues”, as The Times puts it, but I have some questions.
1. How can the General be in front of a court martial when he is not a serving officer?
2. Why didn’t the General settle with the War Office over a case that seems to be a grey area and the money relatively insignificant?
If I may answer my own questions, I suspect the issue may be his pension, withdrawal of, if found guilty. He is a fit looking 57-year-old and his pension is worth almost the disputed sum annually. It seems to me an unfair sanction, totally disproportionate, if I am right about the reason underlying this court martial.
Christopher, In response to your question about a court martial for someone who is not serving, there is plenty of precedent, I am afraid. Indeed, there is, sadly, an ex-WO of my own Regiment about to face the same trial for an alleged offence committed decades ago when he was serving.
On the matter of Nick Welch’s CM, he is being pilloried, in my opinion, pour encourager les autres. In days of yore, one was entitled to Boarding School Allowance (as it was then called) if one made it clear that that you remained prepared to be posted en famille wherever the MOD deemed fit to send you, thus ensuring continuity of education for the children who faced being lugged from school to school probably every 2 years. Even then it was subject to certain caveats relating to the stage of education the child was in. Now called Continuity of Education Allowance (CEA) it is dependant upon proof positive that one or other of the parents is not living statically, as it were, in a residence that would thus afford the child/ren the continuity they need at a local school. The debate is not helped by the fact that the terms of service on the matter are different for the FCO.
The whole thing is distasteful in the extreme and smacks of the prurient pursuit of the ‘coughing major’. I worked for Nick Welch as a retread in the MOD when he was but a colonel and a nicer, more upright chap would be hard to find. I hope this charade is finally accorded the disdain it deserves but I fear the woke brigade’s baying hounds will seek their pound of flesh seasoned by the pepper of envy and a failure really to appreciate what service life is really like. ‘Nuff.
Thank you Anthony for your insight. You have raised another question; is the Boarding School allowance taxed? The “woke brigade” are the winners in peacetime. In combat a different breed of soldier is required.
Christopher,
No, I am pretty sure that the allowance was not taxed or it would have bounced the likes of me (with 3 children at boarding school) as a newly promoted major into a tax bracket that would have been unsustainable. There exists a general assumption that the Army picked up 90% of the fees which is not true. Amazingly one was able to choose the school(s), but, if you went ‘exotic’ you rightly had to find the balance of what the grant failed to meet. Once seduced by the siren call of the allowance, I suspect that many who would perhaps have jumped ship earlier than they did remained serving simply because they had, by default, committed to continuity of education for their brats. The allowance, thus, became something of a retention bonus which I guess was something of a law of unintended consequence.