Britain’s most decadent yummy mummies (and their spoilt little darlings)
For years she’s anonymously written about Notting Hill’s richest mothers. Now banker’s wife Isabella goes public to lift the lid on . . .
THE day that she took her daughter to a three-yearold’s birthday party in the ballroom of London’s fivestar Dorchester Hotel is etched in Isabella Davidson’s mind.
The invitation was a Roald Dahl-inspired golden ticket, written on gold leaf and wrapped inside a chocolate bar, Oompa Loompa statues holding giant lollipops greeted them at the door, and a bouncy castle with a slide and ball pit, surrounded by fairground rides, ice cream vans, candyfloss machines and popcorn makers, filled the ballroom.
Face painters, balloon sculptors and magicians entertained hundreds of children, while their parents quaffed vintage champagne and canapes. In one corner was a table laden with presents, wrapped in branded paper from Harrods, Paris-based children’s retailer Bonpoint and designer Stella McCartney, no less.
As they left, Isabella and her daughter were handed exquisite party bags, which, to her horror, held gifts more expensive than the birthday present they’d brought.
In the nine years she has lived in Notting Hill — the West London enclave ranked the fourth most expensive neighbourhood in Britain and a magnet for oligarchs, plutocrats and multi-millionaires — such ostentatious toddlers’ parties have become routine.
‘It’s like Disneyland without the queues,’ says Isabella, 39. ‘ Parents have things they wouldn’t have at their weddings, and these are parties for tiny children. Someone got Cinderella’s carriage with white horses — inside a hotel!
‘These things cost hundreds of thousands of pounds but, if you live around here, it is normal.’
Mother- of-two Isabella is a pretty good authority on what is ‘ normal’ in this super- rich London bubble.
For three years, she wrote the anonymous Notting Hill Yummy Mummy blog, a waspish diary of the privileged, decadent and often ridiculous world in which she lives.
To outsiders, it might seem like paradise: quiet streets lined with white stuccoed mansions and lush, landscaped gardens, populated by bankers, their chic wives and gaggles of French or Spanish-speaking nannies, who walk pampered pooches and push immaculately dressed children in their prams.
Some say it is more like ‘ Notting Hell’ — riven with rivalry, one- upmanship and backstabbing that can leave even the most confident mother quivering in her Jimmy Choos as she waits for her children to charge out of shool.
Isabella’s accounts of the sharp- elbowed scramble for nursery places, the competitive holidaying and the politics of playdates struck a chord with disgruntled mothers up and down the country, thrilled to be able to laugh at the oh- soperfect lives by which they felt constantly undermined.
It attracted thousands of readers and put Isabella in the spotlight, albeit behind the safety of a pen name.
Now, as she publishes a novel inspired by her experiences, Isabella has been unmasked, which must have led to some
very uncomfortable encounters at the school gates.
‘From the beginning, I told friends it was me,’ she says. ‘I did have one unfortunate incident with someone who said that I might want to splash my life all over the internet, but she didn’t, so that was that.
‘I try my best to keep people’s privacy: the point of the blog is to give an insight into this crazy world, not to mock or judge the people in it. Since I “came out”, I’ve had a few comments. I was nervous the first day I dropped my daughters off at school after going public, but I’m not going to hide. If people don’t want to be associated with me because of what I do, that’s fine.’
Unsurprisingly, Isabella found it easier to speak about Notting Hill’s goings- on when no one knew who she was. ‘ Before, I was quite’ — she makes a stabbing motion — ‘opinionated, for humour’s sake.’
Indeed, she called one neighbour a ‘twiglet blonde who never smiles’ with a ‘philandering pig’ of a former husband.
It is harder to be quite so forthright now, especially as she wants to keep her banker husband and three and six-yearold daughters, out of the limelight. ‘ My husband and I have a similar way of seeing things and he is very supportive,’ says Isabella.
FUN is something the Notting Hill set excel at. She describes an astonishing party for a five-year- old thrown on his parents’ jet (‘Parked in a hangar! What’s the fun in that?’) and a birthday bash for a one-year-old comprising a pool party in the South of France, where guests enjoyed pony rides and fruitpicking in an orchard.
Parties are the tip of the iceberg. Gifts from doting parents are almost too incredible to believe: £200,000 Ferraris for children too young to drive, toddler- sized diamond necklaces from Tiffany, zipwires and ponies and rooms filled with top-of-the-range toys.
She knows a family who flew 20 children to an African safari lodge on their jet. Another took a jet-load to a ski lodge in the Alps.
Her daughters enjoy annual beach holidays in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, and this winter, they are off to Thailand for two weeks — which, to most, doesn’t sound like a cheap family getaway, but the bar is set rather higher in Notting Hill.
‘A friend who goes to Asia lots recommended a hotel, telling me it would be an amazing place to stay,’ she says.
‘I looked it up online and it was £26,000 a night. A night! It would have cost more than £200,000 for a two-week holiday. She can afford that, and why shouldn’t she indulge? We are just not in that bracket.’
Looking around her five-storey Victorian house, in a street of £4 million and £6 million houses, that bracket doesn’t seem too far out of reach.
Her airy living room is adorned with exotic artwork, pricey Diptyque candles and a plush cream carpet (I’m instructed to take my shoes off).
Downstairs is a playroom for her two adorable daughters, a mini gym and a flat for the nanny- cum-housekeeper who cleans, cooks and takes on much of the childcare.
Isabella, who trained as a GP for ten years and still works part- time in the profession, describes herself and her husband as ‘High Net Worth Individuals’, meaning they have more than £625,000 of assets excluding their house ( and the inevitable second home).
By normal standards, they are rich, but compared to some neighbours, who have household staff, swimming pools in the basement, jets and yachts at their beck and call, they are paupers; strangled by the obscene outgoings that come with such a gilded lifestyle.
There are the mortgage payments, nanny’s salary (averaging £30,000 a year), designer clothes, Michelin- starred dinners and holidays ( totalling around £100,000) and that’s before you count the school fees.
‘It’s £20,000 a year per child,’ laments Isabella, ‘and every year, they up the fees.’
She doesn’t have to educate her girls privately but, as any self- respecting Notting Hill mum knows, such institutions as Wetherby Pre-Prep (alma mater of Princes William and Harry) and Tatler favourite Falkner House are illustrious, and nothing less will do.
Her tales of children being tutored before they are old enough to go to nursery, colourcoded spreadsheets to keep track of their extracurricular activities and the extreme measures parents take to get their offspring a coveted school place are both hilarious and terrifying. She tells of parents bribing headmasters (with trips
to their holiday home in the Med or stays on their yacht).
Not everyone is lucky, however: Madonna was allegedly rejected, as was an unnamed designer who refused to take off her sunglasses while on a tour of the school. Isabella sent the application to her daughter’s school the day she was born: ‘My husband delivered it while I was in hospital, but it meant she got a place.’
She doesn’t see herself as a pushy mum: ‘I want my daughters to do things they want, not things I want. They need to be allowed to be children; there’s plenty of time for them to be pushed. Even then, there is a limit to how much they can handle.’
Her tales beggar belief: nursery school parents meet in £3,000-ayear private members’ clubs, Christmas fete stalls raffle tickets to Wimbledon and to private dinners cooked by celebrity chefs.
There are ‘Alpha Mums’ in different haute couture outfits every day. ‘It’s like a catwalk,’ she says. Something model and actress Claudia Schiffer would certainly approve of, having once said: ‘You can’t be too overdressed or too sexy on the school run.’
Her and fashion designer Stella McCartney’s children were at the same London school.
With her pretty features, and petite frame clad in a sleek cerise dress, Isabella looks the part but, like her novel’s heroine, she’s an outsider, having moved to London 13 years ago. Her real name, which she prefers to keep hidden to maintain some distance between her blog and her ongoing medical career, is Maigaelle Moulene.
Born to a French mother and Vietnamese father, she lived in Tahiti, Thailand and Abu Dhabi, before settling in New York, where she attended university, then moved here to study medicine. She moved to Notting Hill when she met her husband in 2008.
She stresses that her friends are not bitchy: ‘I have a supportive group of friends and we get on with our neighbours. This is not about women-bashing: every mum is trying to do the best for her child. We just have different approaches.’
HEr blog details taking her daughter to a ‘mega mansion’ for a playdate, where despite her Diane von Furstenberg dress, Louis Vuitton handbag and expensive jewellery, she was asked if she was there to be interviewed for the housekeeping job.
Isabella says she sometimes feels like a ‘single mother’ because her husband is constantly working and, although her marriage is happy and secure, stories abound of bored wives having flings with household staff and workmen.
She knows of marriages in which women married super-rich men, knowing affairs were part of the deal. When they bought their second home abroad, a friend warned her: ‘Don’t stay away from him too long. He’s only a man, after all.’
What of her children? ‘ My daughters ask: “Why don’t we have an indoor slide, Mummy?” You get rude children who talk back or turn up at a birthday party and immediately ask for their gift bag.
‘ I explain that Mummy and Daddy work hard so we can have a nice life. I try to teach them not to compare themselves to others.
‘I love it here — we all do. We did have to have the conversation: what would happen if everyone turned against us and we were chased out? Thankfully, that hasn’t happened — yet.’
The Beta Mum: Adventures In Alpha Land, by Isabella Davidson, is out on June 20.