Sleeping with the enemy
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| WOMAN OF STEEL: Annanya Sarin |
Annanya Sarin is moving on. After nearly 10 years of working on and off for Lakshmi Mittal as his press officer, she is joining rival Corus, as British Steel used to be called before its merger with its Dutch counterpart, as its “head of media communications”.
If stereotypes are to be taken seriously, Annanya (nee Dutta), the daughter of a Bengali father and an Irish mother — after her father moved from Calcutta, she was educated in Bombay at Queen Mary School and Sydenham College — should be hot-headed but she considers herself to be cool. The mother of a girl and a boy, Anika, three, and Rana, five months, she is married to a Punjabi, Nikul, who, like Annanya, originates from Calcutta.
Anyone who does the PR for Mittal has to do two jobs. First, there is the steel side of his business which now encompasses the world. Annanya has certainly had her fair share of travel — Mexico, Trinidad, Canada, South Africa etc.
Much more challenging has been the packaging of Mittal the man. When he stepped fresh off the boat from Indonesia in 1995, Mittal was an unknown desi in London. Annanya, then based at Ludgate Communications, a city PR agency, began working for him. Later, she became his in-house press officer where she remained for six years. She watched Mittal’s companies climb from number 24 in the steel world to number two, their current ranking based on liquid metal output.
Most recently, Annanya did some freelance media briefings for Mittal on the big wedding. Like Sir Richard Branson, Mittal has become larger than his company. The media has greater appetite for Mittal’s personal life — and whether his yacht is longer than the Hindujas’ — than his company. The counter-argument is that without the publicity he has had for his flamboyant excesses, his company might not have grown as rapidly as it has.
When Mittal first arrived in London, I joked he was stalking British Steel with a view to a possible takeover.
I am, as usual, impressed by my own perspicaciousness. Perhaps the only way Mittal can get Annanya to work for him again is to take over Corus.
Mind you, some people will regard Annanya’s defection as an example of “sleeping with the enemy”.
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| HIDE AND SEEK: Hugh Grant with Jemima |
Jemima is only 30 and freshly divorced from Imran Khan, Pakistan’s president-in-waiting, while the 43-year-old Love Actually actor is still single, having never got round to marrying former longtime girlfriend, Liz Hurley. Some would say Grant’s greatest unsolicited starring role — or possibly solicited — came about in 1995 when he was arrested in the back of his white BMW with Divine Brown, a black Hollywood prostitute.
According to the Daily Express, which snapped Jemima with her hands clasped to her face inside a taxi with Grant, the couple “met four days running” after her divorce. But it is conceivable that since Jemima is no longer another man’s wife, he will find her less alluring.
Earlier this year, golfer Colin Montgomerie announced that he and his wife Eimear were to separate after she and Grant were seen together. But Grant may be genuinely besotted with Jemima’s fortune, some cynics suggest.
The Express has provided chapter and verse on how Grant and Jemima took extraordinary precautions not to be photographed together. At the same venues, they would arrive and leave separately but synchronise their movements with mobile telephones.
All this dodging the press made Grant, seen stopping his Mercedes to pick up an Indian takeaway, a very hungry boy.
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| HUNGRY FOR MORE: Woody Allen |
One evening he was at Vama on the King’s Road, where owner Andy Varma laughed uproariously after Woody had cracked an unintelligible joke about lobsters.
He dined on “Salmon, Kala Chicken, and finished off with vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce”.
A few days later, he was at the Bombay Brasserie (Tom Cruise’s takeaway), where Woody polished off “three Lachcha Paratha, Tandoori Chicken and a Kingfisher beer”, I am informed by Arun Harnal, the general manager.
“He was very annoyed that Kate Winslett, who was going to be in the film with him, has had to pull out because she’s pregnant or something,” adds Arun.
other Birla has given away her fortune — this time involuntarily. G. D. Birla’s granddaughter, Anjali, tells me she has been robbed of jewellery worth £50,000 in London.
When other gold items, cash and travellers’ cheques are taken into account, she puts the loss at £90,000. And she is demanding “compensation” from Marks & Spencer, since the theft of her bag took place at its Marble Arch branch in Oxford Street.
The area is infested with thieves but what makes this incident unusual is the phone call Anjali Sawhney (nee Birla) received from an anonymous man in M&S’s security: “This is an inside job.”
The Indian High Commission in London is backing her claim that M&S was reluctant to help her after she pleaded with the store to check its CCTV footage to see if the thief could be spotted on film.
“Marks & Spencer are quick to take money from the hundreds of Indian shoppers in Oxford Street — but when one of them needs help, it does not seem bothered,” commented a senior diplomatic source. He stopped short of suggesting an Indian boycott of M&S, a group which is going through turbulent times amid falling profits and the threat of a hostile takeover.
Sawhney, a widow whose husband Pavan died two years ago, was shopping one night recently with her LSE student daughter, Shreya, in the lingerie department. “Someone bumped into me,” she recalled. The next moment her trolley was gone with her large shopping bag, which contained her handbag with a pouch. Inside the pouch were six rings, diamond and gold, which she had taken off because she did not want to snag the lingerie. She also lost several gold items, also of “great sentimental” value, including a Cartier case.
When she raised the alarm after realising her trolley and her bag were gone, M&S security adopted a “calm down, madam, have a coffee” to distract her, she claims. Staff refused to look at the CCTV video and, when they did, insisted she was not on film.
She is also disappointed at the police’s alleged failure to treat the theft seriously. However, “when the police were persuaded to see the CCTV, I and my daughter were very much there.”
The thief was not. It was then she received the anonymous call at her hotel, tipping her off that the robbery was an “inside job” — a very serious allegation.
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| BETTER LATE: Keith Vaz |
My High Commission mole tells me that last year, when the wife of a “very senior official visiting from Delhi” was caught with an unpaid item as she left the same M&S store, she was dragged off to the police station. She was let off after she argued: “Look, I have paid £500 for several other items. This £5 item either got overlooked and it may even have been missed by the checkout girl.”
Perhaps one should not kick M&S when it is down but the British flagship should certainly treat its Indian customers better.
Keith Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East, did receive an invitation to the big Mittal wedding in France. Alas, poor Keith had to write back to say: “Thanks for the invite but it arrived a week after the wedding.”
As they say, better to have loved and lost than never to have... etc. etc.
