Cleared of all charges relating to a £266 million money-laundering scam – unlike his four fellow co-defendants, three of whom are on the run – James Stunt, who was declared bankrupt in 2019, argues that the value of his artworks, currently held by museums and galleries, is greater in value than his debts.
But I can disclose that perhaps the most impeccably informed of Stunt’s old acquaintances disagrees.
New York art dealer Ezra Chowaiki, released from a US prison in 2020 after a 13-month stretch for fraud, first met the self-styled gold bullion dealer one weekend in 2015, when Stunt was still married to Formula 1 heiress Petra Ecclestone.
What followed was so extraordinary that it helped spur Chowaiki into writing an eye-popping expose of the art world, the basis for a documentary now in development.
‘Even within the absurd circus that is the high-end art world, Stunt stood out as a master clown,’ Chowaiki tells me from New York, recalling their first encounter during which Stunt asserted that his Rolls was ‘the only truly bulletproof car in England’ and ‘worth £1 million’.
At his Mayfair office – which resembled ‘something between Miami Vice and Succession’ – Stunt reached into a safe, threw an object into Chowaiki’s lap and asked: ‘Do you know how much that’s worth?’ It was a gold ingot.
Chowaiki then offered Stunt a painting. It was, aptly, a clown by Salvador Dali, priced £1.16million.
Stunt responded by getting out his phone, showing Chowaiki two paintings by French artist Georges Braque and saying that he’d trade them for the Dali and $1million.
Saying that he’d think about it, Chowaiki left London.
In the following week, he alleges, he was ‘hounded’ by Stunt, who now offered the Braques for the Dali plus $500,000, and sent a series of ‘increasingly deranged and voluminous texts’.
Chowaiki insisted that Stunt send him photos of the Braques in their frames.
‘The images he had sent could have been scanned from books,’ reflects Chowaiki, who says that he had severe doubts about the authenticity of one of the paintings in particular.
He had one last exchange with Stunt, who lent several paintings to Dumfries House – saved for the nation by King Charles – only for it to emerge that a number of them were fakes.
Called by Stunt, who was seeking guidance about how to have the Picassos in his collection authenticated, Chowaiki explained that they should be submitted to Picasso’s son, Claude.
He recalls that Stunt asked in a ‘hushed’ tone: ‘Do you think Claude could be…influenced?’
The comment (presumably a joke) made Chowaiki laugh, he recalls, before he explained to Stunt that Claude ‘would never compromise himself’.
A source close to Stunt says that the visit to his office couldn’t have happened as he did not have access to his office at weekend.
Doubtless Stunt is speaking in good faith, besides which, as his former butler, John Gilmour, told the Mail On Sunday last month, he frequently enjoyed Sunday lunch with his godfather, convicted crime baron Terry Adams.
But one wonders if he has failed, in this instance, to take into account his past cocaine addiction and the consequent damage that it might have done to his memory.
Chowaiki’s texts for the weekend in question unequivocally show that Stunt asked to meet him on September 27, 2015.
The source additionally insists he did not toss a gold ingot as Chowaiki suggests and denies that Stunt ever asked whether Claude Picasso could be influenced.
Chowaiki, aware that he blotted his own copybook, counters: ‘As unreliable a narrator as I may be, I’m still better than most in this field. Plus, I keep my texts.’
Double take as ‘Kate’ parties at Annabel’s
The Princess of Wales’s absence from Royal Ascot was much remarked-upon, and some at Annabel’s summer solstice party were convinced they had spotted her at the private members club in Mayfair.
However, on closer inspection, they realised it was Meg Bellamy, who played the younger version of Catherine in drama The Crown.
The actress, 22, wore a white mini dress, and one guest tells me: ‘I had to do a double take.’
Hancock’s new ink
Matt Hancock’s reinvention continues.
The former Tory MP, 46, resigned as health secretary after CCTV showed him kissing and embracing Gina Coladangelo, his aide, at Whitehall in breach of Covid distancing restrictions in 2021. The pair were both married to other people.
This week, his daughter Hope, 18, announced online: ‘My dad got a tattoo today. Mid-life crisis.’
Hancock declines to say which design is now inked on his body – or on which part of his anatomy – telling me: ‘I’m not commenting.’ Not like him…
Brian’s boozy podcast appearance
Recalling actor Brian Cox’s recent appearance on her podcast, chef Angela Hartnett mischievously claims the Succession star, 79, got tipsy on margaritas before going on the West End stage that night.
With Cox playing JS Bach in The Score at the time, Hartnett quips: ‘We just got Brian Cox drunk, it was fine.
He went on to do a show later, it was amazing.’ Podcast co-host Nick Grimshaw says: ‘He got right on it.’ Surely not!
Dominic West and Alexandra Tolstoy share trek’s appeal
Dominic West once trekked to the South Pole with Prince Harry, who later shunned him.
But The Affair star’s latest adventure found him saddling up with a far more appealing companion. Alexandra Tolstoy, 51, rode horseback across Kyrgyzstan with West, 55, for a new documentary.
‘It’s a bit embarrassing I haven’t watched The Wire,’ she says of one of the actor’s most celebrated TV dramas. ‘But it’s been so much fun.’
Author and broadcaster Tolstoy is a tourism ambassador for the former Soviet state.
Royal fiction is foul play
The Royal Family may feel they have enough to contend with from America, especially its West Coast. But things can deteriorate further, judging by a
play now being performed off Broadway.
It would be a challenge to summarise Prince Faggot – the play’s title – as merely ‘imaginative’, given that it features a fetish mask and recreational drugs and other activities which would
look more in place in Fifty Shades Of Grey.
A programme note asserts that all the text is fictional and adds that ‘any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental’.
Yet playwright Jordan Tannahill opts for a central character called Prince George, son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Kate. Shame on Tannahill.
The smart set’s talking about Henry’s Royal Ascot role
Carriage three in the Royal Procession caught the eye at Royal Ascot, thanks to the elegant figure of Harriet Sperling, the paediatric nurse accompanying the King’s nephew, Peter Phillips, just over a year after the couple – both divorced – were first seen together in public.
Their marital histories would once have made their attendance unthinkable, but this more forgiving era had another beneficiary – in carriage four.
Not Lady Joanna Morton Jack, the Earl and Countess of Halifax’s only daughter, but Joanna’s husband, judge’s son Henry Morton Jack.
A barrister of brilliance, he’s described as ‘hugely talented’ by Chambers legal directory.
But he’s not always been quite so upright… most memorably at a Madonna film premiere party in his youth when he and his chum, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent’s son, Lord Freddie Windsor, took a little too much refreshment.
Tuesday was certainly a day to build up a thirst but, happily, Henry, 46, remained splendidly vertical.
How divorced Luke finally beat drugs
Rupert Murdoch’s former grandson-in-law, British rapper Luke ‘Lukey’ Storey, has spoken publicly for the first time about the addiction that destroyed his marriage to the media magnate’s granddaughter – just 12 hours after they said ‘I do’.
Charlotte Freud, 24, daughter of media executive Elisabeth Murdoch and PR supremo Matthew Freud, married Luke in 2022 in a star-studded Cotswolds wedding with guests including Woody Harrelson and Claudia Winkleman.
But behind the spectacle, the couple were already teetering on the brink. ‘We had been married for 12 hours when our whole world fell apart,’ Charlotte later admitted.
Luke relapsed on the way to their honeymoon. What followed was a turbulent, 14-month marriage marked by mutual attempts at recovery – and frequent collapse.
for Sarah’s memoir, How Not To Be A Political Wife, at Hatchards in Piccadilly, London. ‘It wasn’t easy writing this book – and for some it will be an equally difficult read,’ she admits.
Luke, 39, now says: ‘I ruined a lot of relationships while I was using – people I loved dearly, close friends, family. You can’t heal relationships while you’re still actively hurting yourself.’
Sarah’s bond with Kemi
She may have fallen out with David ‘man-baby’ Cameron, but my colleague Sarah Vine enjoys warmer relations with the current Tory leader.
Kemi Badenoch joined guests including Kirstie Allsopp and Piers Morgan at the launch party for Sarah’s memoir, How Not To Be A Political Wife, at Hatchards in Piccadilly, London.
‘It wasn’t easy writing this book – and for some it will be an equally difficult read,’ she admits.
(Very) modern manners
The love lives of Fern Britton’s daughters are providing inspiration for her novels.
‘Grace has a lovely partner, but Winnie is single, and whilst she’s a very attractive girl, it all seems so difficult now,’ says Fern, 67, who separated from their father, TV chef Phil Vickery, in 2020.
‘In the 1970s, a man would come and say, ‘Oh, do you want to go out?’ and you’d reply, ‘Yes, thank you’. Now, it seems they’re all giving each other therapy about someone they’ve been seeing for ten days.’
She tells Saga magazine: ‘I was intrigued about how these relationships work and wanted to explore that a bit.’
