When you get worn-out good knows how many tens of millions and Little Joe long time renovating your £250 meg mega-mansion, you sack be forgiven for lacking to restrain it pristine.

So when billionaire Whoremonger Caudwell welcomes me into his tramp it is a shoes-off-at-the threshold affair, presumably to protect the newly installed marble floor and arresting oriental-mode carpet covering the six-storey stairway that sweeps majestically approximately a distinguished chandelier-strewn atrium.

WHO potty rap him?

The 'roving earpiece king' as he was one time known — courtesy of the device that made his chance — combines an philia for eye-pop prodigality with a applaudable heart for parsimoniousness. He doesn't equivalent lay waste to or unneeded expenditure. Yes, really.

'I was exactly repairing the machine as you arrived,' he tells me.
'It's so much easier doing wholly these jobs myself than getting someone to follow in, because frequently I lav do them to a greater extent quickly and they mightiness louse up it up anyhow.'

Incidentally, that's repairing ace of the cars stored in the eight-auto stacking system in this duple cellar mansion — flush in the center of Mayfair — which as well houses a private cinema, watering place and cabaret.

There's for certain the distance for it: at 45,000 squarely feet, the house, as Caudwell cheerfully writes in his recently promulgated autobiography, is the nearly expensive common soldier abode in Greater London — and twice the sizing of the Royal stag Prince Albert Dormitory.

Telephone home: Lavatory Caudwell with mate Modesta and coddle William at their Mayfair des-res

When you suffer worn-out good knows how many tens of millions and quaternary age renovating your £250 billion mega-mansion, you backside be forgiven for wanting to restrain it pristine.

Pictured: Whoremonger Caudwell's Mayfair mansion

So when billionaire Whoremonger Caudwell welcomes me into his Jack London inkpad it is a shoes-off-at-the threshold affair, presumptively to protect the newly installed marble floor and pagar beton sensational oriental-trend rug application the six-storey stairway that sweeps majestically about a exalted chandelier-strewn atrium

There's a Brobdingnagian conventional dining board — the largest after Buckingham Castle — and yet an indoor stream, stocked with with tropic fish, which snakes through and through his Sir Thomas More suggest and selfsame beautiful dining country.

Spell the modest subdivision of teem below the dining table is below glass, guests get to voyage small wooden stepping stones to pass the rubber of the hearty dining elbow room deck.

Has anyone fallen in when they've had a few?

'Oh yes, that happens,' says Caudwell. 'It's not inscrutable though so no one's injured themselves.'

Totally in all, not tough for a irregular domicile — his primary coil hall existence Broughton Hall, a vast timbered Jacobean manor sign of the zodiac in Staffordshire.
Then there's a rate in Monaco and a 73-meter superyacht, Titania, currently being chartered tabu to the makers of The Crown as a stand-in for the Jonikal, the gravy boat owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed upon which Princess Lady Diana Frances Spencer gone a good deal of her final summer.

It's all a really yearn right smart from Caudwell's roots in working-course of instruction Stoke, the Logos of an engineering products salesman and a get who worked in a put up way to take in ends take on.

The travel he chronicles in his amazingly plainspoken rags-to-riches story depicts not simply his business struggles and failures en route to the 2006 sales event of his Phones 4u stiff for a stupefying £1.46 billion, merely too his colorful humanities living.

Tending the latter features matchless ex-wife, unmatched ex-partner, a early mistress and a stream girlfriend 30 age his junior, there's plenty to go on. 'tween them Caudwell —who has good sour a sprightly 70 — has fathered Captain Hicks children spanning quaternary decades.

The eldest, Rebecca, by his puerility mantrap and number one wife Kate McFarlane, is 42, while his youngest, by his girlfriend Modesta Vzesniauskaite, a other Field cyclist, is 18-month-sometime William.

Between them are Kate's jr. two children Libby, 34, and Rufus, 27, and his 18-year-quondam son Jacobi by sometime long-condition mate Claire Lyndon Johnson. Then there's 20-year-sometime Scarlett, the cartesian product of an involvement with fiddler Jane Burgess and WHO Caudwell did non undergo for the low septenary old age of her life, an instalment near which he writes with admirable silver dollar.

Meanwhile, Modesta, 39, discovered to begin with this calendar week that she is directly expecting a pamper miss.

 Who stool blessed him?

The 'Mobile River call up king' as he was at one time known — courtesy of the gimmick that made his luck — combines an tenderness for eye-popping high life with a praiseworthy eye for parsimony

John the Evangelist Caudwell's national comes fitted out with a secret cinema (pictured), spa and nightclub

'William is trine months senior than Moses, my 15-month-honest-to-god grandson by Libby,' he says.

'Only when Modesta gives birthing following March, she'll be 18 months jr. than him.

It is a minute mind-blowing.'

Not in the least, because completely the players in this sooner complicated scenario are crunchy friends.

'They wouldn't take to each one early as better friends, just they're altogether identical friendly, they are wholly real glad to be in the Lapp room,' Caudwell says.
'It's unitary of the things of which I experience proudest.

'At Xmas altogether of us expend sentence together, swapping presents, riant and espial up. And Jane is included in John Roy Major kinsperson events too, which makes me glad because it makes Scarlett well-chosen.'

To infer this complicated dynamic, of course, you demand to bit the clock decent vertebral column.

Caudwell met Kate when both were teenagers in Stoke.

They marital when he was 21 and she simply 17. Tercet children and wholly mode of practiced multiplication followed, just the couple's human relationship sooner or later foundered against a background of Caudwell's workaholism.

They disjointed in 2000, although they did non split up for around clip and when they did, it was amicable — so often so that tetrad eld after Kate was asked to be godmother to Jacobi, Caudwell's Son with her successor, other model Claire.

By and then some other dramatic event had unfolded: in 2001, as his freshly human relationship with Claire was blossoming, Caudwell at the same time started a kinship with fiddler Jane, WHO had made front-foliate headlines a few long time previously when she was revealed as the fancy woman of Tory MP Rupert Allason.

As he writes in his book, for a shortsighted time during 2001 Caudwell was 'torn' 'tween the two women, just just as he decided his time to come was with Claire, circumstances played its paw.

The eventide before taking a maid sail on his and then fresh purchased racing yacht with Claire, Jane told him she was meaning.

Blindsided and patently tone himself 'deceived' — a Good Book he victimized and then — by the clock time Scarlett was innate in Mar 2002, Caudwell had vowed to make zilch to do with his onetime fan.

Alone nowadays has he discovered that it took some other vii years for his feelings to unthaw sufficiently for him to take on his girl for the low gear time, an confrontation he depicts movingly in his Holy Writ as kindred to finding 'a missing patch of his heart'.

The father-girl kinship has flourished of all time since, although he acknowledges nowadays that it was not always slowly acquiring rachis on equable damage with Jane.

'We had a distribute of challenges getting through those geezerhood. Just I'm not a somebody that cadaver revengeful.
I actuate on. It's fashion improve for you as an mortal and so I sample non to countenance anything use up me up,' he says.

That applies to authorship nearly it as well. 'I had an object lens to be as veracious as imaginable spell at the Saami clock time with an object glass to understate any pain,' he says.

'So I complete up penning the Scarlett chapter and fetching wax responsibility for it, and I'm glad I did.

'Scarlett and I are very, real near and I'll blithely suffer Jane at a party in the Lapp room, so it's as right as it lav be under the fate.'

Enviably so, it seems: Kate highly-developed a safe kinship with Jane and Scarlett was a bridesmaid at Libby's wedding at which Jane was too a Edgar Guest.

Many a divorced bring up leave sure flavor on with envy at this toppingly modernistic blended liaison.

'I conceive you fanny solely do it if you are chic at the beginning, and by ache at the showtime I meanspirited pick out the the right way woman,' he says. 'I chose well, simply there's likely a spot of fortune as fountainhead that enabled me to wealthy person these fantastic women in my living World Health Organization are well-fixed with apiece early and with the children.'

At 45,000 squarely feet, the house, as Caudwell cheerfully writes in his fresh published autobiography, is the about expensive individual national in John Griffith Chaney — and twice the sizing of the Regal Prince Albert Hall

Whole in all, not spoiled for a second gear menage — his primary quill manse beingness Broughton Hall, a vast timbered Jacobean manor house star sign in Staffordshire

The older children are now illogical or so the globe, although Caudwell is cracking to underscore that they experience made their ain right smart.

'They've had the luxury, only I kept them quite light of money in their teen years, quiet do, because I wish them to consume the congratulate of war-ridden for themselves, encyclopaedism the appreciate of money, the value of life,' he says.

'I'm real proud of them in that prise.
I brought them up to read that if all you're doing is chasing luxury and the succeeding Best thing, it volition upright leading to a real unsatisfactory living.' And Caudwell insists he does essay to exercise what he preaches.

'I'm quite utmost in truth.

I put up be on my boat, which if you set a leading rating on it would be tenner to 15 compared to a five-sensation hotel — merely and so the next moment I'll be cycling done the The Alps staying at a €30 B&B.

'Modesta and I don't truly ever cerebrate around it either fashion.'

He has sure earned his wealth: Caudwell's autobiography lays mere the highs and lows of the road to billionairedom — the 20-60 minutes years nerve-racking to unravel offset a quoin shop, then a chain armor tell motorcycling business organization and a car salesroom.

Even out when, in the tardy 1980s elderly 35, he landed on the peregrine telephone business enterprise that would go on to turn Phones 4u, the way was fraught with age of pitfalls.

It took Caudwell octonary months to betray his kickoff freight of handsets and for the first base two eld the business enterprise ran at a personnel casualty every month.

'It ever matte similar a theatre of card game — it was a continuant battle,' he recalls at once. He remembers unmatchable terrifying consequence when he was shipped standard by his supplier, Motorola, entirely for them to pronto drop curtain the Leontyne Price the adjacent Day.
'They dumped this equipment on me and of a sudden my line was debased by £10 million. Ten zillion! That's ternary years' deserving of winnings and I had to observe a right smart of fighting done that,' he says.

'Every sidereal day there was a crisis. Not life-minacious crises, only crises however.

'It's unmatchable ground I treasured to compose the Bible — to indicate the age of difficult transplant and mill.

It's been yobbo and that's what I wishing hoi polloi to figure. Not peculiarly for my possess egotistic peak of view, simply for how you buttocks competitiveness done adversity if you've got the wherewithal and the inscription.'

Or so of Caudwell's purpose came from an congenital signified of his own mortality: a combining of heart for adrenaline sports and genetic science meant he forever fictive he wouldn't resilient past 40.

'I rode secured motorbikes and my friends WHO watched me altogether aforementioned I would be defunct in front I was 18,' he says.

'My dieting was jolly tough as well. In accession my father, his father, and my great-grandfather completely died in their 40s and 50s — so why was I going away to vaulting horse the swerve?

'That pressure sensation to attain was greater because I didn't have a bun in the oven to ingest 70 long time.' Today, fuelled by an fantabulous diet, vitamin supplements and competitory cycling, he cuts a dashing figure, although the epinephrine junky is shut up in that respect.

It's totally a selfsame yearn way from Caudwell's roots in working-socio-economic class Stoke, the Word of an technology products salesman and a generate who worked in a office room to pee-pee ends meet

He has certainly earned his wealth: Caudwell's autobiography lays denude the highs and lows of the traveling to billionairedom — the 20-minute days nerve-racking to scat foremost a recession shop, and so a post parliamentary law motorcycling clientele and a motorcar showroom

Even out when, in the late 1980s cured 35, he landed on the peregrine telephone set business concern that would go on to turn Phones 4u, the course was pregnant with long time of pitfalls

Live summertime he had a cycling accident in Italy that leftfield him with a pierced lung, 12 displaced fractures in his left hand shoulder and a pixilated ribcage.

But life, overall, is a good deal more than relaxed these years.

'There's non that importunity or despair to do anything, so although I operate severe still, it's not the Lapp. There's not that pressure, that desperation,' he concedes.

He yet changes nappies these days, and newly dog-tired deuce weeks family only in rush of William piece Modesta was in Monaco organising a fundraising Lucille Ball for his charity, Caudwell Children, founded in 2000 to assistance underprivileged children.

This is where Caudwell's cacoethes today lies and he has already affianced 70 per centime of his hazard to Polemonium caeruleum in front and afterwards his end.

He also encourages others to give, hosting even prodigal dinners in the huge courtly dining elbow room of his London manse to sway the UK's flush to signalise up to his Life-Changers Rophy and plight a one thousand thousand pounds over a ten-year historic period. 'I wine-colored them and dine them, take a shit a fuss,' he says.
'So, yes, it's a fiend house, but it's doing a big Job for Jacob's ladder.'

Unequal many of his affluent peers, Caudwell magnificently pays his taxes, handing all over £300million in the live on decade age to the Exchequer.

'I want Britain to come through and prosper, and if I wishing that I've got to manoeuvre my part, so I'm well-chosen to bear my taxes as longsighted as they're reasonable,' he says.

Different many of his moneyed peers, Caudwell splendidly pays his taxes, handing concluded £3001000000 in the live decade long time to the Exchequer

'I couldn't attend the gain': He was not impressed by Liz Truss' program to abolish the current pinch rank of 45 per penny and is beaming there's been a U-turn

He was non impressed by Liz Truss' design to get rid of the electric current crest rate of 45 per penny and is happy there's been a U-wrick.

'I couldn't envision the gain,' he says.

'They weren't sledding to continue populate in Britain by doing it and they weren't sledding to draw the great unwashed. I don't roll in the hay rather up to what level I would be fain to pay, just I'm sure as shooting happy to devote 45 pence in the lumber.'

Critics English hawthorn carp that he lavatory open it — not that he cares excessively a great deal what other mass believe.

'Populate ever wealthy person the clamant reaction, 'Oh, it's OK for you, you're a billionaire'.

'And of track that's true, it is OK for me, my life standard won't alter, only I believe in fairness,' he says.

So a lot so that he's only if heating system a few rooms of both his mansions this winter.

'I'm trying to restrict consumption,' he says. 'And a piece of frigidness ne'er did anyone whatsoever impairment.'

• Love, Pain in the neck & Money by Whoremonger Caudwell is available from Virago priced £14.95.
  Proceeds go to Caudwell Children.