Jew World Order

By
Richard Dennen

PUBLISHED:

16:33 EST, 7 July 2012

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UPDATED:

16:47 EST, 7 July 2012

Richard Caring and Robin Birley are not friends.

Perma-tanned Caring – the rag trade tycoon turned restaurateur – is nicknamed ‘the coat hanger king’ and lives in a vast Hampstead house dubbed ‘the Versailles of London’.

Birley, by contrast, is the languid, aristocratic son of glamorous socialite Lady Annabel Goldsmith and Mark Birley, the club owner and founder of Annabel’s. He is never seen without his whippets.

And Mayfair, where we lay our scene, has been riven by a cataclysmic feud between them, the Montagues and Capulets of social London.

Rivals: Robin Birley with a beloved whippet, left, and club boss Richard Caring with his wife Jackie, right

Their spat has been caused by Robin Birley’s triumphal return to his old turf with a new club, 5 Hertford Street – on which he has lavished £30 million. As his sister, Jemima Khan, tweeted: ‘After bankruptcy, litigation, bullying 5yrs of hard slog, it’s a real lesson in tenacity and perseverance.’

And 54-year-old Birley’s path has certainly not been an easy one.

In her autobiography, Lady Annabel writes of how, while in hospital after her son’s birth, her husband tapped her on the shoulder and said: ‘Darling, you must wake up. There must have been a mistake. I think you’ve been given the wrong baby – this one is simply hideous.’

At the age of 12 Birley was mauled by a tiger at Howletts zoo in Kent, leaving him horribly disfigured. In 1986 his brother Rupert, 30, disappeared while swimming off a beach in Togo, West Africa.

He was disowned by his father and fell out with his sister, India-Jane, when in 2006 he was caught using £200,000 of money from Annabel’s to pay a former policeman for information (which turned out to be false) about a man with whom his married sister had an affair and child.

The following year he suffered the ignominy of his father, just before he died, selling the clubs empire  to which Robin was heir – as  well as Annabel’s it included Mark’s Club, Harry’s Bar and George, the smartest venues in town – to Caring for about £100 million.

Caring, 60, seemed to have developed an insatiable appetite for buying up social London with a swoop that included Le Caprice, The Ivy, J Sheekey, Scott’s and Daphne’s.

But then, three years ago, Birley began plotting his comeback with a new club, to be named Birley’s, on Hertford Street off Shepherd’s  Market, a corner of Mayfair historically renowned for its prostitutes.

Caring was having none of it. He said that his ownership of Robin’s father’s clubs extended to the exclusive rights to the name ‘Birley’.

Expense: Robin Birley on the site of his new venture, 5 Hertford Street, on which he has lavished £30 million

The dispute headed towards the courts. But what’s in a name? Birley decided that any other name would smell as sweet and a gentlemanly accord was struck over a lunch at Wilton’s some months later.

But perhaps Caring is now regretting having Birley as competition, with wealthy London falling over itself to snap up his £25,000 founder memberships. Even just being rich isn’t enough – Birley is said to have returned the cheque of a billionaire he did not feel was quite right.

The club – featuring several bars, dining rooms and a basement nightclub called Loulou’s – is the talk of high society. In the opening week, Mick Jagger, Kate Moss and Daphne Guinness were there. An Indian billionaire left a £5,000 tip in cash.

‘It’s one of the most exciting things to happen in London nightlife for a generation,’ says Tatler editor Kate Reardon. ‘The buzz is very similar to when Mark Birley opened Annabel’s, I imagine; if you haven’t been there already you’re a bit of a loser.’ Birley, stalking the corridors of 5 Hertford Street meeting and greeting, is marked at all times by his whippets Arnie and Chester. Both he and they hope to emulate the success of Annabel’s. They are to him as the corgis are to the Queen. Like the Queen, he does not give interviews but will give a whistle-stop tour.

He is tall, has endless limbs and talks in the clipped tones of a Wooster. The whippets race down the stairs before him, underneath a chandelier and the gaze of his late cousin Loulou de la Falaise, the Yves St Laurent muse after whom the nightclub  is named. The vibe is Mitfordian  ‘P.L.U.’ (People Like Us) but of course to make money it cannot just be about eccentric English. As we turn into the upstairs dining room, six Versace and Cavalli’d euro trash girls with inflated breasts and lips look up. ‘The dress code has been one hell of a battle,’ he sighs.

Richard Caring celebrating with artist Tracey Emin at her birthday party, hosted at the tycoon’s Mayfair club

But it is in the beautiful courtyard for the smokers, all candlelit and filled with peonies, where the social melting pot of the absolute elite itself converges. Here, we are in a pre-Austerity England time warp. It is glamorous and grotesque.

A billionairess leans over in barely-there lace Stella McCartney and asks Taki Theodoracopulos, the playboy Greek shipping heir, for a light. ‘You can have whatever you like,’ he leers before rising to greet fashionista Debbie von Bismarck, wife of a German count. Does she know that Beatrice and Eugenie York, whom she so disastrously styled for the Royal Wedding, are already downstairs at the bar of the nightclub? Awkward.

Sources close to Caring say he has no intention of going to 5 Hertford Street and that, though there has been a public rapprochement, Birley is not his sort of person.

Instead, he hopes his latest venture, Little House (the new Mayfair outpost of Soho House) on Curzon Street, will rival it: 5 Hertford Street is the antithesis of trendy and all that Soho House stands for.

What next in this turf war as the Montagues and Capulets tussle over who is poaching whose staff? For now, high society can order a whisky sour and settle into the comfort of  5 Hertford Street – and wait for the next episode in this saga where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

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