Will Osborne be at
Nat’s £1m party?

By Richard Kay for the Daily Mail
Updated: 04:26 EDT, 8 April 2011

Two-day bash: Nat Rothschild wil be 40 in July

While the rest of us suffer the biggest squeeze  on our budgets since the Twenties, George Osborne’s Oxford University pal, multi-millionaire Nat Rothschild, has no need to worry about such fripperies as belt-tightening.

The financier is planning to push the boat out for a huge party to celebrate his 40th birthday on July 12.

Already Nat, who with his father Jacob boasts a fortune in excess of £1.4 billion, has dispatched elegant invitations to global movers and shakers, asking them to keep a date free for his spectacular knees-up.

The bash is expected to cost up to £1 million and involves two days of partying in sumptuous surroundings overlooking the Adriatic.

A tax exile who lives in Klosters, Old Etonian Nat is inviting politicians, industrialists and celebrities to his new marina development in Montenegro.

These include former U.S. republican presidential candidate John McCain, South African mining tycoon Mick Davis and Ivan Glasenberg, boss of Glencore, one of the world’s largest commodity companies.

Peter Munk, 83, the Hungarian- born chairman of Barrick Gold, the world’s largest gold-mining corporation, and Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska will also be invited — they are co-developing with Nat the £5 billion scheme to build the Monaco of the Balkans near the port of Tivat, with hotels, marina, apartments and boutiques.

Naturally, former Labour Business Secretary Peter Mandelson is expected.

He was a guest together with Osborne at Nat’s Corfu villa three years ago when Rothschild briefly fell out with the then shadow chancellor after accusing him of soliciting a £50,000 donation from Deripaska, who also happens to be Montenegro’s biggest employer.  

Prince Andrew is also likely to be invited. However, one of Nat’s friends has been crossed off the list — Saif Gaddafi, not least because the Colonel’s son insists he will never quit Libya.

But I wouldn’t bet on that. . .

Writer Daisy Waugh, granddaughter of Evelyn — who has unforgettably named her children Panda, Zebedee and Bashe — is unimpressed by debonair BBC journalist Tim Willcox, 47.

Daisy, 44, dislikes seeing him on TV because it reminds her of the time he was ‘chortling and smirking’ after he made her run around the hockey pitch at Taunton School having caught her smoking — Willcox was head boy at the time.

However, the smirk worked a treat on President Pinera of Chile — Willcox was the only journalist Pinera granted an interview after last year’s mine rescue.

Well, no smirk without ire.

Tania and a battle of Blenheim

Row: Lady Rotherwick

A peace of sorts has  broken out in the aristo-spat between shipping heir Viscount Rotherwick and his wife Tania, and their nearest neighbour, the fearsome Rosita, Duchess of Marlborough.

Rosita, the ex-wife of the four-times wed Duke, still lives on the 12,000-acre Blenheim estate in Oxfordshire.

The house is a mile from Rotherwick’s Cornbury Park, which is half the size, and where every summer he hosts a popular music festival. Unfortunately, when Rotherwick and Tania re-applied for a licence for the event this year, Rosita objected.

The Rotherwicks were outraged at her opposition, not least because during Rosita’s 36-year marriage to the Duke she had overseen countless public events at Blenheim.

Now despite her objections, the couple have won the licence to hold their Wilderness Music Festival in August. And in a bid to reinstate neighbourly civility they have even had Rosita around for drinks since their fall-out. ‘I talked to her at our drinks party but nothing at all was mentioned about her objection to the festival, which was perhaps just as well,’ says Tania. 

‘No one could understand why she had objected because the festival has been held here for years.

‘It was just that the licence had to be  re-applied for because it was in the name of the previous events manager.’

Surely it was only a matter of time before Kelly Hoppen, the brash ex-lover of Nicky Clarke and Sol Campbell, had a go at the telly.

Now the multi-millionaire interior designer, who re-styled Victoria Beckham’s house in Los Angeles, is going to instruct the viewing hoi polloi in the use of her favourite colour, taupe (that’s grey to the rest of us).

‘It’s very exciting. It’s my first TV show,’ says twice-married Kelly, 51, who has also made-over Gwyneth Paltrow’s abode.

‘It’s for Channel 5 and I’ll be going into people’s homes to help them sort their houses out. They won’t be palaces or anything grand.

‘I am actually going to be visiting very ordinary homes and meeting very ordinary people.’

That’ll be a nice change then.

Lady Pembroke’s NHS delivery

Joy: The Earl of Pembroke and his wife Tori

Despite David Cameron’s plans for a radical shake-up in the health service, the mega-rich Earl of Pembroke — worth £115 million and owner of the magnificent Wilton House, Wiltshire — decided his local NHS hospital was a perfectly fine place for the arrival of his first baby.

His stunning wife Tori, 25, gave birth to a baby girl, Lady Alexandra Eloise Ekaterina, at Salisbury District Hospital over the weekend, weighing in at 6lb 8oz.

Tori returned to Wilton a day later, saving them around £6,000 in private maternity fees.

Handsome William Herbert, 32, married former art student Tori in May last year and their  £300,000 wedding reception was held under a circus tent in the grounds of their 14,000 acre estate, with acrobats swinging on trapezes overhead.

According to pals, they have now re-located the nursery at Wilton and are paying for a live-in nurse who will help them through any sleepless nights.

Professors spend their careers trying to get papers published in reputable science journals. But Oscar-winning Colin Firth today makes his academic debut in periodical Current Biology.

The King’s Speech star’s name appears as an author of a study commissioned while Firth was guest-editing the Today programme over Christmas.

The paper — Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults — found brain scans can reveal if someone is a liberal or a conservative.

His own scan might be more tricky — Firth famously quit the Lib-Dems over tuition fees.

P.S. J.K. Rowling may feel like casting a spell on the actress playing her in a TV film of her life.

Poppy Montgomery has just finished shooting Magic Beyond Words, but she struggled with Harry Potter.

‘She was ploughing through Harry Potter And The Order O f The Phoenix while she filmed another movie,’ I am told. ‘It became a running joke because she read it for the entire shoot yet never managed to finish it.’

And at 766 pages, can you blame her?

Edited by Helen Minsky