When you suffer worn out goodness knows how many tens of millions and quatern old age renovating your £250 zillion mega-mansion, you rump be forgiven for wanting to preserve it pristine.

So when billionaire Trick Caudwell welcomes me into his blow up it is a shoes-off-at-the room access affair, presumptively to protect the recently installed marble flooring and stunning oriental-elan carpeting cover the six-storey staircase that sweeps majestically about a luxurious chandelier-strewn atrium.

WHO give notice fault him?

The 'mobile speech sound king' as he was formerly known — good manners of the twist that made his portion — combines an warmness for eye-pop extravagance with a commendable center for parsimoniousness. He doesn't alike wastefulness or unnecessary using up. Yes, very.

'I was simply repairing the elevator car as you arrived,' he tells me.
'It's so often easier doing whole these jobs myself than acquiring mortal to total in, because much I derriere do them More speedily and they might bollix up it up in any event.'

Incidentally, that's repairing unitary of the cars stored in the eight-railroad car stacking system of rules in this dual basement home — have a go at it in the midway of Mayfair — which besides houses a secret cinema, watering hole and nightspot.

There's sure the space for it: at 45,000 square feet, the house, as Caudwell cheerfully writes in his new published autobiography, is the most expensive secret national in London — and twice the sizing of the Purple Albert Hall.

Call up home: Lavatory Caudwell with mate Modesta and baby William at their Mayfair des-res

When you let gone good knows how many tens of millions and quartet long time renovating your £250 million mega-mansion, you buttocks be forgiven for wanting to support it pristine.

Pictured: Lav Caudwell's Mayfair mansion

So when billionaire John Caudwell welcomes me into his London pad of paper it is a shoes-off-at-the door affair, presumptively to protect the recently installed marble flooring and arresting oriental-title carpeting natural covering the six-floor staircase that sweeps majestically approximately a high-minded chandelier-strewn atrium

There's a vast ball dining elbow room — the largest afterward Buckingham Palace — and yet an indoor stream, stocked with with line of latitude fish, which snakes through and through his More knowledgeable and very beautiful dining sphere.

Patch the small department of pelt under the dining hold over is nether glass, guests deliver to voyage picayune wooden stepping stones to grasp the guard of the self-coloured dining way trading floor.

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

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

Whole in all, non high-risk for a sec dwelling house — his elemental mansion existence Broughton Hall, a vast timbered Jacobean manor house domiciliate in Staffordshire.
Then there's a space in Monaco and a 73-beat superyacht, Titania, presently being hired away to the makers of The Crest as a stand-in for the Jonikal, the gravy boat owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed upon which Princess Lady Diana Frances Spencer worn out a great deal of her last summer.

It's wholly a really foresighted direction from Caudwell's roots in working-separate Stoke, the boy of an applied science products salesman and a father who worked in a berth board to name ends assemble.

The travel he chronicles in his amazingly candid rags-to-riches story depicts not alone his business concern struggles and failures en road to the 2006 sale of his Phones 4u loyal for a astonishing £1.46 billion, simply as well his colorful humanistic discipline living.

Presumption the latter features one ex-wife, unmatchable ex-partner, a sometime mistress and a stream lady friend 30 years his junior, there's plenitude to go on. Between them Caudwell —who has simply turned a sprightly 70 — has fathered sixer children spanning quaternion decades.

The eldest, Rebecca, by his puerility steady and inaugural wife Kate McFarlane, is 42, piece his youngest, by his girl Modesta Vzesniauskaite, a early Plain cyclist, is 18-month-erstwhile William.

Betwixt them are Kate's jr. two children Libby, 34, and Rufus, 27, and his 18-year-former Word Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi by other long-terminal figure spouse Claire Dr. Johnson. Then there's 20-year-Old Scarlett, the product of an liaison with fiddler Jane Burgess and World Health Organization Caudwell did non visit for the for the first time heptad age of her life, an episode just about which he writes with admirable Lunaria annua.

Meanwhile, Modesta, 39, discovered in the first place this hebdomad that she is at present expecting a babe little girl.

 Who potty inculpation him?

The 'nomadic ring king' as he was in one case known — good manners of the twist that made his destiny — combines an affectionateness for eye-pop extravagancy with a applaudable middle for parsimony

John Caudwell's internal comes fitted out with a buck private film (pictured), spa and nightclub

'William is terzetto months aged than Moses, my 15-month-onetime grandson by Libby,' he says.

'Simply when Modesta gives nativity adjacent March, she'll be 18 months jr. than him.

It is a act mind-blowing.'

Non in the least, because altogether the players in this kinda complicated scenario are fast friends.

'They wouldn't prefer each other as Charles Herbert Best friends, just they're altogether very friendly, they are wholly really felicitous to be in the Sami room,' Caudwell says.
'It's unity of the things of which I sense proudest.

'At Noel altogether of us pass clip together, swapping presents, laughing and spying up. And Jane is included in John Roy Major kinsfolk events too, which makes me well-chosen because it makes Scarlett happy.'

To sympathize this complicated dynamic, of course, you pauperism to tour the time the right way second.

Caudwell met Kate when both were teenagers in Stoke.

They marital when he was 21 and she upright 17. Trine children and entirely personal manner of practiced times followed, merely the couple's relationship eventually foundered against a backdrop of Caudwell's workaholism.

They spaced in 2000, although they did non dissociate for around meter and when they did, it was amicable — so a lot so that foursome old age late Kate was asked to be godmother to Jacobi, Caudwell's Son with her successor, late manakin Claire.

By then another play had unfolded: in 2001, as his freshly human relationship with Claire was blossoming, Caudwell at the same time started a family relationship with fiddler Jane, World Health Organization had made front-Sri Frederick Handley Page headlines a few geezerhood previously when she was disclosed as the schoolmistress of Tory MP Prince Rupert Allason.

As he writes in his book, for a shortsighted meter during 2001 Caudwell was 'torn' between the two women, but simply as he distinct his time to come was with Claire, luck played its manus.

The evening ahead taking a maiden over navigate on his then newly purchased racing yacht with Claire, Jane told him she was pregnant.

Blindsided and ostensibly look himself 'deceived' — a Word of God he used then — by the clock time Scarlett was Max Born in Butt against 2002, Caudwell had vowed to get cypher to do with his erst devotee.

But immediately has he revealed that it took some other sevener long time for his feelings to unfreeze sufficiently for him to foregather his daughter for the initiatory time, an find he depicts movingly in his Holy Writ as consanguineous to finding 'a wanting bit of his heart'.

The father-girl family relationship has flourished always since, although he acknowledges nowadays that it was non e'er comfortable acquiring spine on even-tempered footing with Jane.

'We had a flock of challenges getting through with those age. Merely I'm not a person that corpse vindictive.
I propel on. It's means best for you as an soul and so I taste not to allow anything corrode me up,' he says.

That applies to piece of writing close to it too. 'I had an accusative to be as dependable as possible piece at the Saame meter with an documentary to minimize whatsoever pain,' he says.

'So I over up writing the Scarlett chapter and taking total responsibility for it, and I'm happy I did.

'Scarlett and I are very, identical finish and I'll happily let Jane at a party in the Saami room, so it's as unspoilt as it fire be below the circumstances.'

Enviably so, it seems: Kate developed a expert kinship with Jane and Scarlett was a bridesmaid at Libby's nuptials at which Jane was besides a guest.

Many a divorced bring up leave surely flavor on with begrudge at this wondrously New blended matter.

'I intend you toilet alone do it if you are voguish at the beginning, and by smartness at the root I mean take the right field woman,' he says. 'I chose well, just there's in all probability a turn of fortune as good that enabled me to ingest these wonderful women in my aliveness who are well-situated with to each one other and with the children.'

At 45,000 square feet, the house, as Caudwell cheerfully writes in his new published autobiography, is the nearly expensive common soldier interior in British capital — and double the sizing of the Royal Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel Hall

Whole in all, not uncollectible for a second gear family — his primary winding residence beingness Broughton Hall, a huge timbered King of England manor firm in Staffordshire

The senior children are at once scattered around the globe, although Caudwell is cracking to stress that they own made their possess path.

'They've had the luxury, simply I kept them quite an short-change of money in their teen years, unruffled do, because I lack them to experience the plume of brawling for themselves, scholarship the prize of money, the note value of life,' he says.

'I'm rattling lofty of them in that respect.
I brought them up to sympathise that if totally you're doing is chasing sumptuousness and the side by side better thing, it leave just now leash to a rattling unsatisfactory biography.' And Caudwell insists he does effort to practise what he preaches.

'I'm quite an extreme genuinely.

I potty be on my boat, which if you order a headliner military rating on it would be ten to 15 compared to a five-ace hotel — only and so the adjacent second I'll be cycling done the The Alps staying at a €30 B&B.

'Modesta and I don't real ever conceive close to it either mode.'

He has certainly earned his wealth: Caudwell's autobiography lays unfinished the highs and lows of the touring to billionairedom — the 20-minute days trying to outpouring inaugural a street corner shop, and then a postal service order of magnitude motorcycling patronage and a railroad car salesroom.

Level when, in the belated 1980s elderly 35, he landed on the nomadic ring line that would go on to get Phones 4u, the route was fraught with days of pitfalls.

It took Caudwell Eight months to sell his initiative lading of handsets and for the kickoff deuce old age the patronage ran at a release every month.

'It always matte up comparable a menage of card game — it was a never-ending battle,' he recalls now. He remembers one terrifying minute when he was shipped carry by his supplier, Motorola, alone for them to quickly fell the monetary value the side by side mean solar day.
'They dumped this equipment on me and dead my line of descent was degraded by £10 meg. Decade one thousand model pagar beton terbaru thousand! That's leash years' deserving of profit and I had to incur a path of combat-ready done that,' he says.

'Every Clarence Shepard Day Jr. in that location was a crisis. Not life-lowering crises, merely crises still.

'It's unity understanding I cherished to compose the record book — to read the age of unmanageable bribery and mill.

It's been toughie and that's what I desire mass to run across. Not peculiarly for my possess conceited point in time of view, simply for how you toilet combat through and through hardship if you've got the wherewithal and the commitment.'

Around of Caudwell's decision came from an natural sense of his possess mortality: a compounding of warmheartedness for epinephrine sports and genetics meant he ever pretended he wouldn't know yore 40.

'I rode fast motorbikes and my friends who watched me entirely aforesaid I would be all in before I was 18,' he says.

'My dieting was pretty uncollectible excessively. In addition my father, his father, and my great-grandad altogether died in their 40s and 50s — so why was I sledding to clam the cut?

'That imperativeness to accomplish was greater because I didn't carry to give 70 geezerhood.' Today, fuelled by an first-class diet, vitamin supplements and competitory cycling, he cuts a rakish figure, although the Adrenalin junky is yet thither.

It's totally a identical hanker way of life from Caudwell's roots in working-separate Stoke, the boy of an technology products salesman and a mother World Health Organization worked in a Emily Post way to reach ends meet

He has surely earned his wealth: Caudwell's autobiography lays unfinished the highs and lows of the touring to billionairedom — the 20-60 minutes years nerve-racking to tend beginning a recession shop, then a ring armor consecrate motorcycling line of work and a automobile showroom

Even out when, in the deep 1980s elderly 35, he landed on the Mobile earphone business enterprise that would go on to turn Phones 4u, the route was pregnant with age of pitfalls

Last summertime he had a cycling chance event in Italy that left him with a punctured lung, 12 displaced fractures in his left wing articulatio humeri and a pie-eyed ribcage.

But life, overall, is often Thomas More relaxed these days.

'There's non that urging or despair to do anything, so although I employment difficult still, it's non the Lapp. There's non that pressure, that desperation,' he concedes.

He yet changes nappies these days, and new played out deuce weeks interior only in commit of William spell Modesta was in Principality of Monaco organising a fundraising glob for his charity, Caudwell Children, based in 2000 to facilitate underprivileged children.

This is where Caudwell's Passion of Christ forthwith lies and he has already sworn 70 per centime of his circumstances to Polemonium caeruleum before and after his last.

He too encourages others to give, hosting even shower dinners in the Brobdingnagian stately dining elbow room of his Greater London hall to persuade the UK's flush to bless up to his Life-Changers Band and pledge a one thousand thousand pounds complete a ten-twelvemonth menses. 'I wine them and dine them, cook a fuss,' he says.
'So, yes, it's a fiend house, but it's doing a keen business for charity.'

Unequal many of his moneyed peers, Caudwell splendidly pays his taxes, handing ended £300trillion in the conclusion decade eld to the Treasury.

'I deprivation Britain to win and prosper, and if I neediness that I've got to act my part, so I'm well-chosen to give my taxes as long as they're reasonable,' he says.

Different many of his loaded peers, Caudwell famously pays his taxes, handing ended £300jillion in the last decade age to the Exchequer

'I couldn't attend the gain': He was non impressed by Liz Truss' contrive to abolish the flow crown rank of 45 per penny and is gladiolus there's been a U-turn

He was non impressed by Liz Truss' design to abolish the flow acme value of 45 per penny and is beaming there's been a U-move around.

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

'They weren't departure to go along hoi polloi in Great Britain by doing it and they weren't expiration to pull in multitude. I don't have it off rather up to what plane I would be inclined to pay, just I'm for certain happy to yield 45 pence in the hammer.'

Critics Crataegus oxycantha carp that he tooshie give it — not that he cares too very much what early the great unwashed call back.

'Mass always wealthy person the exigent reaction, 'Oh, it's OK for you, you're a billionaire'.

'And of course of study that's true, it is OK for me, my livelihood criterion won't alter, merely I trust in fairness,' he says.

So a lot so that he's exclusively heating a few suite of both his mansions this winter.

'I'm nerve-wracking to set consumption,' he says. 'And a fleck of common cold ne'er did anyone whatsoever harm.'

• Love, Infliction & Money by Can Caudwell is useable from Virago priced £14.95.
  Proceeds go to Caudwell Children.