In 2007 Mikhael Gorbachev starred in a Louis Vuitton advert. He was driven past the Berlin Wall with Louis Vuitton luggage and the photograph was printed in Vanity Fair. It was baffling and reassuring, but nothing lasts forever.
A few years ago I went on the Kleptocracy Bus Tour. It is run by a man called Roman Borisovich and it tours London — and sometimes Oxford —identifying kleptocratic crimes, feuds, housing, anxieties and behaviours. During a recent tour, a neighbour of Andrey Guryev, the fertiliser magnate who bought Witanhurst in Highgate, testified that a voice from a security box had asked him to stop strimming his own hedge. Of course, I looked for kleptocratic restaurants from the tour bus — for Novikov (Asian and Italian), for Rivea at the Bulgari Hotel (Italian), for Mari Vanna (Russian), for Rextail (meat). But Borisovich did not mention them and I did not blame him. Any kleptocratic restaurant tour would have to take in Itsu on Piccadilly (sushi) and the Sheraton Park Lane’s Palm Court (afternoon tea), where Alexander Litvinenko met the FSB goons. It is a question of taste, and so I did not race to Zizzi’s in Salisbury for a quick review last week. I loathed the gags about Zizzi’s — poisoned, but still in Zizzi’s? — but snobbery dies hard in England.
The Kleptocracy Tour bus trundled through Knightsbridge. That is no longer a real place but a smelted fairy-land housing the international rich, including Russians removing money from Russia with or without Vladimir Putin’s permission, which is tidal, and laundering it through townhouses, which they ruin with windows and carpets. It is a parallel world with a parallel map and Knightsbridge is its capital city. Harrods is its Waitrose, even if the biscuits are terrible.
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