Brocket’s rocket over £3,000 pair of curtains
LORD BROCKET doesn’t exactly have a squeaky clean reputation, but striking a 69-year-old woman over a set of curtains seems like a new low.
Brocket, 68, who was jailed in the 1990s over a £4.5million insurance fraud involving his classic car collection, has been caught on video verbally abusing society upholsterer Grace Stedman and swatting her with his motorcycle glove.
The film was shot as the peer confronted Grace at her London shop after he was awarded £2,838.92 in a court action against her – the sum covered the cost of the curtains plus a £75 admin fee.
He arrived at the premises in Pimlico on a motorcycle and kept his helmet on – which ‘terrified’ Grace.
She says: ‘Brocket entered my shop saying I owed him all this money. He pushed his way in, said I was a charlatan, and hit me around the face with his glove.
‘When I stood up to him, he became aggressive. It was terrifying.’
In May 1991, as he face financial hardship, Brocket had two of his staff dismantle three Ferraris and a Maserati and hide them in a storage unit in West London. He then claimed the £4.5million in insurance. But the scam was discovered and the peer served two and a half years in jail.
It’s perhaps surprising to hear that the former I’m A Celebrity contestant has so much money to spend on soft furnishings. The aristocrat moved out of Brocket Hall, his ancestral house in Hertfordshire, for a pad in Fulham, where he contracted Grace’s firm, Grace Interiors, to fit the curtains. Grace says: ‘We’d finished them for him in 2017 but he took me to court in December 2019. He said the curtains were too long and he had to get them altered. We measured them top to bottom – the problem was the size of the curtain pole he used.’
Grace Interiors is in the process of being dissolved after she lost a separate court case to another dissatisfied customer. She recently set up a new business, Grace Designs, in new premises and that is where Brocket confronted her last month.
Brocket did not respond to requests for comment. Sounds like all parties need to pull themselves together...