Swiss family? Robbie’s on...
Star swaps ghost home for Geneva
ROBBIE Williams is selling his ‘creepy’ English country manor in order to enjoy a new Swiss role with his family.
The singer has decided a £24million villa on the shores of Lake Geneva is the right spot to set up a permanent home with wife Ayda Field, 41, and their four children, Teddy, eight, Charlton, six, Coco, two, and one-year-old Beau.
In the meantime, Robbie has quietly put 17th century Compton Bassett House back on the market.
The singer revealed last year that he believed the eight-bedroom Wiltshire pile was haunted – in particular, daughter Teddy’s bedroom.
“It gives me the creeps,” Robbie, 47, told a podcast. “Teddy told me, ‘That room scares me. I don’t like that house’.
“I said, ‘It scares me too. You don’t have to sleep there any more’.
“If there is great grief or great pain or tragedy, I think it can soak into the walls and leave an essence there that remains for a very, very long time.”
Robbie also said he’d been spooked by seeing the ghost of his old cairn terrier Trixie at the house.
RESHUFFLE
The singer admitted he had bought the £8.1million property on impulse in 2008 – two years before his marriage to actress and model Ayda. But the couple hardly ever spent any time there.
The house, which sits on 75 acres of land, has its own tennis court, swimming pool, home gym, media room and even a football pitch, as well as a helicopter pad and quad bike track in the woods used for what Robbie called “rage racing”. A source told us: “Robbie was in a different phase of his life when he bought Compton Bassett House.
“It seemed like an idyllic hideaway in the English countryside but he never really felt at home there.
“In a matter of months he realised it wasn’t where he and Ayda wanted to settle. “Now he’s planning a reshuffle of his property portfolio since deciding to buy in Switzerland. The family moved there last summer and rented for six months to make sure they wanted to stay.”
Take That hero Robbie, who is worth £200million, also owns a £26million Beverly Hills mansion as well as a £17.5million home in Holland Park in West London.
He and Ayda sold their beachfront house in Malibu, Los Angeles, for £20million last year.
“They’re both really excited to have found exactly the lifestyle they were looking for in Switzerland,” said the source.
“They’ve been there for less than a year but the children are settled in schools and they all love the calm, family vibe they’ve got going on there.”
A spokesman for Williams said he had no comment to make.
Teddy said, ‘That room scares me’. I said, ‘Me too’. It gives me the creeps ROBBIE ON HIS DAUGHTER’S ‘HAUNTED’ BEDROOM
A FORMER Ofsted chief urges headteachers to warn parents off the “racist and homophobic” Patriotic Alternative curriculum.
Sir Michael Wilshaw said: “It’s a pushback against the National Curriculum which recognises not only history and development of our culture in centuries but also how society has changed over the last hundred years.
“It’s pernicious stuff. The Department for Education should say this sort of propaganda should be avoided at all costs.”
Sir Michael said regulations have been tightened in recent years following reports of radicalisation issues with some home-schooled children. He added: “This curriculum falls in the same category. It’s deeply worrying stuff and we don’t want people to be subject to it.”
Labour’s Sarah Owen, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Hate Crime, said: “It’s sad at a time when the country is pulling together for the health of the nation, that individuals use this as an opportunity to do exactly the opposite.”
Home-schooling is a growing trend – aside from lockdown. More than 60,000 were taught at home in 2018-19 – up 8,000 in a year. Local authorities have a duty to ensure those children receive suitable fulltime education and order them to attend school if they don’t.
as lyrics ask why they are here. Another, called If I Wasn’t White, alleges people of other skin tones get more opportunities.
Videos feature bearded historian Professor Steve Parish, but there is no suggestion his content is racist. Prof Parish insists he simply makes educational videos for kids and told the Mirror: “I’m pleased if anyone wants to use my ramblings, including Patriotic Alternative.
“What we do is factual source material. We don’t do anything with any political bias to it. We cover English history to English schools.”
Quizzed on whether the curriculum is racist, he replied: “That’s a very woke and uneducated opinion of what PA is.
“It’s an alternative, as the name suggests, for patriotic people. As far as I know that’s not illegal.”
PA launched its “Alternative Curriculum” in 2019 and has grown the syllabus since millions of children turned to home-schooling.
Advocacy group Hope Not Hate researcher Patrik Hermansson said: “They added new parts, ran a campaign and spread it on social media. This is more dangerous because parents have a bigger responsibility for children’s education and a bigger possibility of influencing them.
“They [PA] want to instil in kids a racist world view that views white people as superior to others. It’s hostile towards other progressive ideas such as feminism and sexual freedom.”
An education plan on PA’s site vows: “British history will be restored as a central pillar of every child’s education. It will be prohibited for any school to promote anti-white propaganda... children will not be taught to hate themselves or ancestors.”
PA’s controversial views go on and on. It backs capital punishment, wants a complete halt to immigration unless in “exceptional cases”, promotes a “traditional nuclear family” unit consisting of a mother, father and children – and vows to ban “sexualised material or LGBT propaganda” in public.
The Mirror previously told how recruits were taken paintballing. In October, counterterror experts warned PA was recruiting children as young as 12 via live web interviews.
And last week it emerged the group is hosting Call of Duty tournaments in an attempt to woo younger members.
PA leader Mark Collett was exposed by Channel 4 in a 2002 documentary about the BNP. He was recorded saying he admired Adolf Hitler and called AIDS a “friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays have it”.
Collett’s former girlfriend, Eva Van Housen, has a swastika tattoo on her chest.
Deputy leader Laura Towler claimed PA’s curriculum is visited by 10,000 people a month. She told the Mirror it is designed by “qualified teachers” and she and Collett had no input in creating resources. She added: “We launched our curriculum before the pandemic. Home education is something we’ve supported for many years.
“Hope Not Hate are a far left, anti-white activist group who lie constantly and who frame patriotic people as hateful and facts as conspiracy theories. They are never able to debunk anything we say. It’s ludicrous to say that we have ever encouraged hate or violence.
“Loving your own people doesn’t mean that you hate anybody else.”
But PA’s curriculum is even slammed by a group set up to help people leave the far right – by former believers. Nigel Bromage, founder of Exit UK, said: “Promoting a misleading version of history simply ill-equips children for life and puts them at a disadvantage, which no parent would ever want.”