Tamara Ecclestone: 'I think with relationships you have to learn from your own mistakes'

Tamara Ecclestone, heiress daughter of Bernie, the Formula One billionaire, is in her pyjamas, breastfeeding her two-year-old daughter Sophia in the opulence of her Kensington sitting room. It’s a blazing morning but blinds cloak the windows and — oddly — both fires and air conditioning are roaring. More surreal still, Teddy, a caramel-coloured Maltipoo, is using the length of the room to launch dive bombs into my lap.

We’re here to discuss her blowdry bar company Show (which among other things makes “hair fragrance”), but much of what Tamara, 31, says is drowned out by the mechanical churning of a supermarket Peppa Pig ride transplanted into their sitting room and driven with joyous screams by Sophia. Outside in the garden there’s a child-size replica of the house (although I suspect that it doesn’t have the £1 million crystal bath, bowling alley or hair salon), which is somehow fitting because Tamara’s, set in the security zone of Kensington Gardens, is a sort of Barbie Versailles itself.

On arrival I am escorted by pumped suits down a side alley and into a staff entrance, where uniformed Asian women are tidying, and then into a black lacquered room decorated like an explosion in a glitter factory.

For a few minutes I am left alone, perhaps to admire the art (photographs of stilettos on dollar bills). Then I am asked to sign a legal document stating I’d been invited to provide services to Ms Ecclestone and was banned from mentioning anything I see or hear during my visit — such as an argument between Ms Ecclestone and her husband, Jay Rutland, a City trader from Essex.

Of course a row between Eccelestone and Rutland would be precisely the kind of thing a journalist would mention — especially after reports that they are “effectively estranged”. Instead I decline on the basis that an interview is not “a service”. After some more solitary, I’m whisked into the house proper.

Décor aside — and I mean Jesus: gold doors? A sculpture of a Chanel bag? And is that persistent trail of glitter real gold and silver flakes? — there’s a hollowness to the house, perhaps because the three members of the family only live in about four of the 57 rooms.

Tamara’s pyjamas are cashmere. Otherwise she’s naked of eyelash extensions and her trademark full-whack make-up, for which she apologises, blaming her restricted beauty routine on breastfeeding. “People keep saying, ‘Oh, but don’t you want to get Botox? And I say, ‘You can’t have Botox or fillers. You can’t even have a peel.”

Later she tells me she only had Botox “years ago when everyone was doing it and didn’t like it. My mum is 58, had nothing done to her face and looks amazing. Maybe I’ll have her genes.”

As well as a Tracey Emin neon saying “Tamara and Jay Always”, the walls are blown-up photographs of her tossing her mane, primped and pouting in tiny dresses with a toe-to-root tan. It’s remarkable how pretty she is without it all, like a young Brooke Shields.

She is unexpectedly self-effacing too, nervously admitting to four As at A-level and being the first in the family to go to university when she took up a place at the London School of Economics, which she then gave up “because I was offered a job presenting The Rebel Heiress”.

Student life wasn’t for her, she admits, mostly because she still lived at home in Chelsea. Did she drink beer from a plastic pint glass? “I’ve never drunk beer in my life.”

Indeed her fame rests on being an heiress (Bernie, 85, is worth £2.6 billion) and her string of bad boyfriends — not least Derek Rose, who tried to blackmail her for £200,000, and Omar Khyami, of whom video evidence in flagrante was sent directly to Bernie.

“In life you have to kiss a lot of frogs,” she reasons. “My dad always says smart people learn from other people’s mistakes, but I think with relationships you have to learn from your own mistakes.”

She agreed to marry Rutland after just a month and their Cap d’Antibes wedding cost £7 million. Recently he was cleared concerning allegations that he assisted a cocaine dealer.

She doesn’t want to discuss any of this, other than to joke that Sophia has essentially kicked Rutland from the bed. “Sleeping next to your child is the best thing in the world,” she laughs. “Sorry husbands: baby cuddles are better.Sophia was sleep trained for the first six months and then had a bad fever. I put her in bed with me that night and she never went back to her cot. Sleeping next to me is like sleeping next to the cookie jar — she can snack all night.”

It’s upsetting how much criticism she gets for breastfeeding, she says. “Everyone finds it shocking, but I wouldn’t push it on Sophie. When she’s done we’ll both know.”

Tamara and her sister Petra, 36, (who has a three-year-old and one-year-old twins), slept in their own parents’ bed when they were small, “so it seemed normal to me.”

The sisters now live in each other’s pockets. Their daughters are “best friends” (and will go to the same nursery). Neither sister drinks — “I’d rather have a piece of cake as an indulgence” — and both prefer TV and early nights. “We’re like boring grannies,” says Tamara. “We text at nine o’clock to say goodnight.”

It sounds a bit lonely. Does she miss a community? After all she lives in the secure zone of Palace Gardens, surrounded by anonymous ambassador’s residences. “I don’t know any of my neighbours,” she admits. “But I like it here. I’m happy in this house. When I have more kids it will be even better.”

Tamara has opted not to have a nanny. She changes all the nappies herself. Who looks after Sophia if she goes out? “No one. I don’t go out.” Has she never left the child with someone else? She thinks. “I left her in the green room with my sister when I did Loose Women,” she says.

It’s made socialising with her old friends difficult. “They go for three-hour lunches with a bottle of wine. That’s why my sister and I do so much together. Feeding the ducks is not fun if you don’t have kids.”

Far from a rich and distant stereotype, Tamara’s mother Slavica — a 6ft 2in Croatian model who met Bernie while on assignment in 1982 (they have since divorced) — was just as hands-on. She picked them up from school every day, despite Tamara’s pleas to use the Tube. Her father often dropped her off, and would “leave the office to come and watch netball matches”.

She’s keen to impress on me that she wasn’t spoiled. Both parents had modest upbringings. They would stay with her mother’s Croatian family every year “in their flat and sleep on the sofa” — she is fluent in Croatian. And it wasn’t a childhood of designer labels — unlike her own daughter’s — but high street clobber like Miss Selfridge. “Dad would sit patiently while we tried things on. He’d say we could pick one thing and then he’d tell us what would look nice and what didn’t. It was so cute.”

Despite being the “soft touch” of her two parents, Bernie would say no to his daughters. He could also embarrass them. She relates how once aged 12 she’d wanted a bomber jacket from King’s Road. “Dad took me to the shop and then started bartering with the man. I was mortified. My dad being a massive wheeler-dealer insisted on getting a discount on this bomber jacket.”

Is he proud of the blowdry bars she’s set up in Westbourne Grove and Wimbledon Village? “He’s had a nosey,” she says. “He didn’t tell me until afterwards. He was slyly looking and then sent wives of friends to have their hair done there. So far — thank God — all the feedback has been good.”

I suggest it must have been intimidating for boyfriends in the past to see Bernie in the background. But she calls him an “inspiration” and says she hopes she has some of his “business sense”. In fact it was her mother Slavica “that all my friends and boyfriends feared. She was fierce. I’m so going to be that mum.”

Tamara had her first boyfriend at 12, her first cigarette at 13 but “that is not going to happen” is her response to the idea of Sophia doing the same.

Having Sophia has helped her crippling phobias, among them claustrophobia. “The thought of getting on the Tube — or even in a lift — gives me high anxiety. My husband made me go up the Shard — I was hyperventilating. With Sophia I get in a lift and pretend to be okay even though my palms are sweating.”

She is terrified of parrots, after seeing one bite her mother as a child, but won’t get professional help because “I’m a weirdo about things like that. I think it’s just mind over matter”.

Finally I ask what she thinks of being England’s answer to the Kardashians. She looks horrified. “My God, no! I’m so unglamorous.”

Really? What’s the least glamorous thing she’s done recently? She thinks. “We were by my sister’s pool in LA recently and Sophia wasn’t wearing a nappy. ‘Mama I need to go poo poo,’ she said, and squatted right there. So I picked it up with my bare hands and flushed it down the toilet.”

Over to you, Kim.

@chedwardes

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