What’s he like as a grandad?
“Err, sweet. He’s really cute. He loves Lavinia.”
How often does she see him?
“Um, like every few weeks. He travels so much he’s kind of busy with work and
now with kind of things coming up…”
I assume she’s talking about his trial for bribery in a Munich court. How is
that affecting them all?
“It’s just stressful. It’s just a lot of stress coming up, I guess. It’s just
stressful times.”
Are they pulling together as a family?
“Yeah, it makes us closer, I guess.”
Is she close to the octogenarian’s new wife, 37-year-old Fabiana Flosi?
“Um, no, we’re not. I mean, we’re close as a family…” She goes quiet. “Yeah,
we probably don’t want to…” says her PR, closing the matter. “Yup.”
Why so cagey? The 25-year-old’s father doesn’t seem to share her inhibitions.
According to Bernie, her husband James – another rich kid she met on a blind
date eight years ago – is “harmless – but he’s an idiot… When I saw James a
few weeks ago, I told him quite upfront: ‘You are a flash bastard.’ ” And
yet maybe Petra’s shyness has something to do with a statement she makes
bluntly early in our interview: “I don’t trust people.”
She says that people try to take advantage of her “on a weekly basis”. Most
recently, a man pretending to be a Kazakhstan oligarch stole £500,000-worth
of her jewellery while posing as a potential buyer of her £32 million house
in Belgravia. Petra hasn’t had much luck with property of late. Her £100
million mansion in Chelsea, which is being remodelled to include a pool, gym
and underground car park, has run over budget. What’s worse, the man charged
with renovating the property, Paul Fleury, has been accused of siphoning off
almost £1.6 million of Petra’s money by forging invoices, although Fleury
maintains all the payments were verbally agreed with Petra.
“It’s just been a nightmare from day one,” says poor Petra, who today is
dressed ‘casually’ in leggings, jumper and a selection of sparkling
bracelets from Cartier and Hermès. “He said the house was supposed to be
finished in a year and a half and it’s gone over that now. What p—– me
off is he was earning a good salary and he had a nice family, a nice wife,
like, his daughter came to stay with me in LA. He came to my wedding.”
Ah, yes, the £5 million wedding in an Italian castle with performances by
Andrea Bocelli and Alicia Keys. But I digress. Fleury is, says Petra, “just
a greedy, sad, pathetic human being”.
Anyway, she lets it all wash over her because, as she says, “there’s always
some drama” on Planet Petra. She has a very small group of close friends,
which consists of “my sister, my mum, my dad, my husband, and now I have my
daughter. I enjoy spending, like, every single day with her because she’s
the only person who hasn’t really hurt me. She’s the only pure and innocent
person in my life. Everyone’s like, ‘I don’t really understand how you enjoy
spending every single day with someone who doesn’t really speak back to
you’, but I just love her.”
She speaks like a cast member of Made in Chelsea, which she is at pains to
point out she turned down, despite the fact that “all of the people from
Made in Chelsea aren’t actually from Chelsea, and I am.”
She has just become an aunt, to Tamara’s daughter Sophia. “It’s great, I was
just with them this morning. She’s the cutest baby.” Petra bought Tamara a
pink, crystal-encrusted Silvercross pram, which has been the subject of
cruel mockery by the press. “I’m really offended!” she half-laughs. How did
she come to choose it? “Well I just thought, ‘What is the most elaborate
thing I can buy her?’ and that came to mind. I didn’t know she was actually
going to take it out.”
The pram is one of several buggies that Tamara has been spotted with in recent
weeks, and Petra admits to having “quite a few, to be honest. You know when
you first give birth and you want to, like, test a few out? That’s what
Tamara is doing now. I don’t see what the problem is.”
Petra’s daughter is currently with her mum, Slavica, who divorced Bernie in
2009. Do they still get on? “Well they’re not like best of friends.” Has
Slavica met anyone else? “No, no! She’s enjoying spending time with her
friends. She likes to travel. She’s an adventurer. She’s like a free spirit.
She loves to be on her own. She’s so happy.”
We are meeting in a Belgravia café to discuss her work with the charity
Meningitis Now. Petra had viral meningitis when she was 14 and working for
the charity came naturally to her because “it has such a close spot in my
heart, I guess”. It’s the only charity she works with. “I don’t believe in
doing something just, like, for the sake of it, kind of only to make myself
look good. I want to do it just because I actually believe in something.”
She has a clear memory of her illness. “So basically, I woke up sick thinking
I had a really bad case of the flu and as I was kind of a hypochondriac
during my teenage years, my parents made me get on with my day.”
It was Sunday morning so, of course, she went to the Kings Road with her
friends, “and then I had to get a taxi home because my friends thought there
was something seriously wrong with me”.
When she got home she felt sensitive to all lights. There was a rash on her
arm and her neck felt stiff, and so her parents called a GP. “I know I’m in
such a fortunate position that my parents were able to get a GP round on a
Sunday afternoon, that there’s other people who can’t do that, who kind of
aren’t in a fortunate position like us,” she says.
She was in hospital for a week and, though it was scary, “I felt so sick I
didn’t care. They gave me like a lumbar puncture. I think my mum cried more
than I did.” Lots of people still feel effects many years on – exhaustion,
anxiety and even memory loss – and Petra wonders if her frequent headaches
are down to the meningitis. She doesn’t know how she caught it – few people
ever do – but she is keen to raise awareness of the illness because “it
touches everyone, from young children to adults”.
Now she’s a mother, she’s even more concerned with health. “I’m like a germ
freak. The first few months I was so scared, you’re literally watching over
them, you’re too scared to sleep even while they’re asleep.” Her husband
would like more children because “I owe him a son, apparently. He says I owe
him an heir.” But at the moment she is just enjoying looking after Lavinia
and working on her range of designer evening bags that are on sale in
Harrods for as much as £3,000. “I work from home,” she explains helpfully.
She is also keen to start up some sort of kids’ club in London, because she
says there is “nothing here” for children to do. “It’s bizarre. The stuff in
LA… I mean I can’t even explain. They have, like, live bands for kids. Like,
you go to this music house and they have these animals singing to these
kids. I’m not even joking. It’s like a concert. There’s like puppets and a
train going round. But I tried to take her to a music class here which was
really crap.”
They are members of Purple Dragon, the £4,000-a-year members’ club for
children, where there is a swimming pool and recording studios and a gourmet
chef, but “I don’t really like it,” she sniffs. They have to make do with
going to the park every day.
In LA “people are just happy that you’re rich. They don’t ask you how you made
your money, whereas here they want to know everything.” It’s understandable
that Petra might get irritated by questions about how she made her money,
given that she didn’t, but still, she’s willing to brush all of this aside
and is starting to spend more time in the capital so she can be closer to
Lavinia’s grandmothers. Plus, a childhood spent gallivanting around the
globe has turned her into something of a homebody.
“You know when you’re a kid and you kind of get forced into things, and
they’re always, like, a drag, just kind of boring?” Yes, I think. Like being
made to go to the supermarket? “Like now I hate skiing because I always used
to get dragged on skiing holidays.”
What else have her parents managed to put her off? “Um, like tennis. My mum
forced me to play tennis.” Anything else? “Travelling,” she says quickly. “I
hate travelling. I hate staying in hotels because my mum used to make me go
away like literally the whole time.”
If she does have to travel, does she go commercial? “Sometimes. Very rarely.”
She starts laughing. Life on Planet Petra really is very different to life
on Planet Earth.
Meningitis Now’s Viral Meningitis Week is running from May 5 to 11. The aim
is to dispel misconceptions that viral meningitis is always “mild”. For more
information please visit www.MeningitisNow.org.