Boujis to boost British exports to the Chinese

 
Prince Harry and Chelsy Davy
31 May 2012

Chancellor George Osborne has been pressing the case for more British exports to China and Boujis has heard the call.

The South Kensington nightclub, famous for entertaining the young royals and their clique, is opening its second branch in Hong Kong this September.

Boujis, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, has found a site on Pottinger Street, which is thick with bars and restaurants.

“It was an obvious market for us,” says Matt Hermer, who founded Boujis and also has Eclipse and the Wyld at the W Hotel in his portfolio. “A former British colony with a lot of expats. While the restaurant scene there is booming, there’s only a small nightclub offering. It has taken us three years to find a site which has the right rent — a big problem in Hong Kong — and licence.”

There will be a bout of jostling for position as Hermer is putting together a membership committee that will shape the guest list for the new venue. However, he’s too polite to name names at this stage.

Meanwhile, back in London Boujis, whose reputation has been buoyed by pictures of Princes William and Harry partying at the club, are returning the compliment. They have repainted their frontage as a Union Jack in preparation for the Jubilee celebrations.

Beard gives Gove nul points for grasp of classical history

Does Michael Gove need a history lesson? Diary pin-up Mary Beard thinks so. The Cambridge classics professor has noted that, when giving evidence to Lord Justice Leveson yesterday, the Education Secretary’s classical references were a bit off. Gove said: “I think there have been spin doctors ever since the time of the Roman Republic.”

Not so, says Beard.

“The Republic didn’t have spin doctors in anything close to the meaning of the term,” she says. Spin, as Beard defines it, is about the management of news and public opinion.

“In the ancient world you find that happening in monarchies and autocracies, not in republics and democracies,” she insists. “So Alexander the Great had spin doctors. The Roman emperor Augustus took PR and ‘on-messaging’ to new heights, with his guru Maecenas, the Alastair Campbell of ancient Rome. Ancient news management goes hand in hand with autocratic rule, and —sorry Mr Gove — ‘nul points’ on the history front this week.”

Broken Hearts and spilling the beans

Peaches Geldof and her fiancé Thomas Cohen (pictured) joined Alexa Chung and Sir Peter Blake at the annual Mending Broken Hearts event, in aid of the British Heart Foundation, at Proud in Camden last night. Among the lots in the silent auction was a gown worn by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley to the premiere of Transformers. Meanwhile fellow model Jade Parfitt was regaling me about her recent Soho dinner with ex- California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger . “He was fascinating,” said Parfitt. “ When I met him, he said, ‘Oh, you are the model.’ It was just so funny that he knew who I was. It wasn’t a date, and I’d like to make that quite clear. We went to the Dover St Arts Club and we ate healthily. Arnold, I’m surprised to say, had a salad. And he approved of my new vegetarian diet, which you wouldn’t take as read from a body-builder. I was quite surprised. And then he got down to it, and spilled the beans.”

Show goes on after Cassandra

In a heroic display of professionalism, actor William Chubb will be on stage at the Oxford Playhouse tonight following the death yesterday of his wife Cassandra Jardine after a two-year fight with cancer. Chubb has been on tour with Mary Shelley, a play by Helen Edmundson based on the life of the writer of Frankenstein. After appearing in the play in Leeds, Nottingham and Newcastle, Chubb will later be performing in Winchester before coming to the Tricycle Theatre in London on June 14. “I hope the children will join me in Oxford at the weekend,” says Chubb. “I’m sure it’s what Cass would have wanted me to do.”

England made me – and my godmother

Thanking Lindy Dufferin for allowing him to launch his latest book, How England Made the English, in her magnificent garden in Holland Park, writer Harry Mount said she had always been a lovely godmother.

“I remember how she took me to see 101 Dalmatians in 1976,” he told guests including Dominic West, Molly Guinness, Piers Paul Reid, Prof Mary Beard and Prof Norman Stone. “Particularly that she didn’t take my brother and sister and I could see them scrabbling at the window.”

He also thanked his girlfriend, Sacha Bonsor, daughter of former Tory minister Sir Nicholas Bonsor, especially as she had asked not to be mentioned. Sir Nick was chatting with Harry’s father, Sir Ferdy Mount. Perhaps the two baronets will be discussing wedding speeches in due course.

West said after he made his Bafta acceptance speech last weekend for his Best Leading Actor role as Fred West someone in the audience heckled: “You forgot to mention Fred.”

Rushdie’s movie madness

Who knew Sir Salman Rushdie could be bought so cheap? The author, who spoke at 5x15 at the Tabernacle last night, sold the film rights to Midnight’s Children for just one Canadian dollar.

Sir Salman recounted how film director Deepa Mehta had started talking to him about making a film of The Enchantress of Florence, which had just been published, during a dinner in Toronto in 2008. But then she chanced a question about his novel Midnight’s Children, for which he held the film rights. “‘Could I do that instead?’ she asked, and I said, ‘Oh, all right then, it’s a deal’. The sale price was rapidly agreed. I sold her a two-year option for one Canadian dollar. ‘You probably want to be paid bit more than that — will you write the screenplay as well?’ she said, and the fee went up to two dollars.”

Out in November, it is the first film of a Rushdie book. Literary advances look generous by comparison.

* The annual Charles Wheeler award for broadcast journalism will be announced tonight at the University of Westminster in Regent Street. It is given in memory of the late BBC correspondent Sir Charles Wheeler, whose beauteous barrister daughter Marina, wife of Mayor Boris Johnson, will be there along with Alan Rusbridger and Bill Hagerty.

* The time for deference towards Rebekah Brooks seems well and truly over. Richard Ingrams writes in The Oldie that she is “semi-educated, conceited, ruthless and, when it suits her, flirtatious.” He says “her long, straggly, flame-coloured strands of hair make her look like some ghastly harridan who in older, more enlightened times would have been burned at the stake.” Come on Charlie Brooks, what do you think of Ingrams?

* “I’ve never eaten a pasty in my life,” Lord Peston, father of BBC business editor Robert, debating the pasty tax in the Lords yesterday. How many pasties has Robert eaten, I wonder?

* Sacre bleu, rouge et blanc. Covent Garden restaurant Clos Maggiore is offering couples celebrating their 60-year anniversary this year a complimentary meal to mark the Queen’s Jubilee.

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