Edward Davenport – “Fast Eddie” to the tabloids, “Lord Davenport” to himself, “convicted fraudster” at the Serious Fraud Office – first met Bonnie Blue at a party. She needed a place to sleep with 1000 men. (The hotels, understandably, had turned him down.) Fortunately, Davenport was in possession of 32 Portland Place, a £15 million mansion in Marylebone. He saw no reason not to secure the space. “Because it’s a house, and because I’m single, and because it doesn’t really matter to me, having any kind of Bonnie Blue stigma doesn’t really affect me,” he explained. The result, filmed and later viewed by millions on OnlyFans, made Blue, briefly, the the most talked about woman in Britain – celebrated in some quarters as a liberated agent of her sexuality, condemned in others as a symptom of civilizational collapse, shared everywhere with a breathless mix of sobriety and moral alarm. Davenport enjoys this kind of attention. “It’s tremendous PR … and fun for me, and a talking point when you go out.” Blue regularly appears on his Instagram, with posts suggesting the pair are having an intimate relationship and that he may even be the father of her unborn child. (She later admitted the pregnancy was fake.) Davenport described his role in all of this in simple terms: “We mutually work well together,” he said. “She owns her content, but I definitely help with the location side, the idea side, the structure of it and how it’s going to run and function.”
Davenport’s journey to becoming Britain’s answer to Hugh Hefner began young. The son of a west London restaurateur (the title, he claims, came with a property in Shropshire), he told me his upbringing meant he was used to waiting. At the age of just 16, he organized “Gatekeepers’ Balls”, gatherings in country houses for public school students. By the age of 24 he was already in trouble with the tax authorities – he was jailed for nine months for failing to charge VAT on tickets, although he only served 16 days. After release, Tatler he asked how he had found the prison. “Boring,” he said. “There aren’t many parties there.” No. 32 is the second home Davenport has owned in the area. He originally hosted events at No 33, just across the road – the former Sierra Leonean embassy, which he bought during the country’s civil war – but was forced to sell it in 2015 to pay a £14m Compensation and Confiscation Order to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). In 2011 he was jailed for seven years, eight months for fraud after defrauding customers out of millions. Davenport was released after three years for health reasons. He denies any wrongdoing. “I went from being the richest man on the block when I was in prison to the poorest man on the block in Mayfair,” he told me.
Over time, Davenport’s crowd has shifted and he’s adapted accordingly. The Russians have mostly left – sanctioned or forced out, the big charity balls at Grosvenor House and Dorchester have gone with them. “The demographics vary a bit, but luckily I seem to identify with most of them in one way or another,” he said. “(When I started) I was casting mostly for public school kids, who were called Sloane tramps in those days. That demographic changed a lot. There were a lot of young people coming from different countries — China, Russia, all these Arab countries.” At his parties today are what he calls “rich young Londoners” – some aristocrats, some musicians, some singers, students from China at London universities – who have heard about the palace gatherings and find their way through a friend of a friend. People who haven’t gone out for years suddenly reappear, newly divorced. His great-granddaughter recently came with a hundred friends from UCLA, all of whom wanted to hear about Bonnie Blue. “It’s the first thing they ask.” The old crowd has thinned out, he admitted. “They’re not just aristocrats like they used to be. Over the decades they’ve thinned out a bit.” The changing nature of the clientele reflects, in its own way, the changing landscape of power and wealth in the UK over the past few decades, from old aristocracy to new money and home-grown elites to global elites. One thing remains constant: his approach. “Get a lot of girls there.”
There is a line that runs, uninterrupted, from the Hellfire Club to Portland Place. It goes through the public houses of the Victorian Haymarket, through 1950s Soho where Christine Keeler moved between jazz clubs and ministerial bedrooms, through 1980s Essex mansion parties where the nouveau riche discovered that tramping was something you could buy if you had enough money. The line is not about sex. It is a very English negotiation between respect and its opposite – the need, among the rich and powerful, to periodically demonstrate that they are above the rules. On a black winter night, I went to see who was buying.
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During the day it’s easy to miss number 32. Sitting on a busy corner in Marylebone, central London, the Georgian mansion blends in among embassies and town houses. But on weekends, after dark, it comes alive. Guests enter and exit between tall Palladian columns. Models and musicians fill its stone steps for art salons and fashion shows run by Anglo-Russian artist Philip Firsov, whose work covers its walls. Like Blue, Firsov struck up a friendship with Davenport after meeting him at a party. He understands the value of the environment that Davenport creates. “He has a certain public image, but when you get to know him he’s a really good guy,” he told me. Firsov hosts art salons and fashion shows at home, and his paintings hang in the same room where Blue set her record. He described the video as a “stunt”. “My art was in porn, which I’ve seen, unfortunately – it had a million views. So what do you do about it, complain or go with it?” He added: “I am now the most famous unknown artist in the world.”
I arrived at the end of one of Firsov’s parties. Entry was £100 for men and free for women. A group of men hovered outside, debating whether it was “worth it.” Davenport greeted me on the way inside. He was wearing a suit and his thin, pale skin looked artificially smooth. Inside, the walls were covered in lewd art. In the toilet hung a large tapestry depicting men in military uniform lounging with naked women. A liar stood by a ladder; the road blocked by a red rope and rail. I asked him what was up there. “The bedrooms, only for VIPs,” he replied.
Women in sequined dresses moved through the grand rooms of the house, the low lighting barely making them shine. The men wearing crisp shirts and heavy watches laughed a little loudly. I went to the bathroom. An American slammed the door and asked me if I was doing cocaine inside. (I wasn’t.) I opened the door and he introduced himself. He told me that he had a lot of lawyers on retainer, that it came with the territory of being an “extraordinarily high net worth man.” “As soon as a girl starts talking crazy, I text my lawyer, have a group chat with her and my lawyer and say ‘you guys can talk,'” he said. The accusations the girls made were, of course, all lies.
I asked him the source of his wealth: “business”, he replied. “Import and export.” He showed me a video of him pouring a pile of money on a bed and rolling around in it. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad and well-built, in a three-piece suit, hat and glasses with orange lenses. I was wearing a cotton shirt and had to keep unbuttoning because of the heat. He wasn’t even sweating. He gave me a cigarette. Guests smoked openly inside. He asked me if I was married; I told him I had a boyfriend. He offered to be godfather to my future children. “Presents will be fine,” I replied. He asked if I would like to see a picture of his three children and pulled out his phone before I could answer, moving intently. Finally he showed me. Three sports cars stared at me. I went to buy a drink and got lost in the crowd. When I looked back, he was gone.
“My parties have always been popular,” Davenport told me. “It helps to keep up with all the latest things, instead of being stuck in the past.” The men I saw that night were part of the same pattern. Bodies huddled together, heads dip and rise, swan-like, from the tops of the keys. On the dance floor I met a woman who told me, laughing, that she wouldn’t leave her drink unattended. I asked her why she was there: “Stay open late and it’s free,” she shrugged. The walls pulsated. I couldn’t make out the words to the reggaeton music. Over time, the club became noticeably more masculine. Men huddled against the walls, checking their phones, scanning faces, circling the rooms. Whatever sex was going on was happening elsewhere, behind closed doors, leaving them to grind restlessly. The house seemed to hold their hopes in its high ceilings, sinking them into the plaster, letting them hang there like moisture.
I decided it was time to leave. I saw Davenport in the restroom, waving to a group of party-goers. A woman was whispering in his ear. Outside, a group of young men got into a taxi. One of them called me asking how it was inside. He wanted to know if there were many girls there, or even if Bonnie was present. I told him there were women, but the report was closer to Blue’s record attempt than he’d like. For a moment it looked like he might go inside. I added that it cost £100 to get in and his face fell. For a moment he returned home, weighing the possibilities against the price. He told his friend to redefine Uber. “It’s not worth it,” they decided.
The road had fallen back to quiet, with only the occasional car passing through Marylebone. And for all the suggestion of excess, what No 32 delivers is paler than the truth. The necessarily clandestine world of Cliveden and Profumo depended on discretion. Davenport parties circulate openly, repackaged for platforms like OnlyFans and promoted in the same way as any other form of entertainment. If there are equivalents now to the scandals that once plagued the institution, they are happening elsewhere, out of sight. At number 32, the old markers of British wealth have not so much disappeared as been put up for sale, like Davenport’s title. What he sells is the fantasy of proximity—to status, to a certain kind of permissibility. And in Britain there is always someone willing to pay.
(Further reading: Don’t celebrate the decision of social media addiction)
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