batty ideas

I
won’t be bullied. I am of the
Australian ilk that will not
tolerate being bullied. — Michele Renouf. “Bimbo”
who rattled the old buffers club

December 3 2002

HER friends call her
“uplifting”, her enemies the “fragrant fascist”, and the woman herself, in self-deprecating mode, lays claim to be the world’s “most unsuccessful bimbo”.

Whatever her most fitting title – and she’s had a few – you can’t say that the
Australian-born Michele Renouf, who at 56 remains one of the most glamorous members of London polite society, runs away from a fight.

But now her devotion to David
Irving, the Holocaust revisionist historian banned from Australia, threatens to split a pillar of the British establishment.

She is unmoved. “I won’t be bullied,” she told The Age. “I am of the Australian ilk that will not tolerate being bullied.”

Lady Renouf is probably best known in
Sydney and Melbourne as the third and final marital fling of the late New
Zealand financier, Sir Frank “The Bank”
Renouf, almost 30 years her senior.

Their union collapsed in 1991 after only a few months, when Sir Frank reportedly discovered the then Countess
Griaznoff was a truckie’s daughter from
The Entrance, on the NSW central coast and not a Russian noblewoman. He later described the marriage as a “nasty accident”.

Lady Renouf’s devotion to another older man threatens to drive a wedge through the establishment Reform Club.

Formed 166 years ago, the Reform Club, on Pall Mall, is an exclusive haunt of
Britain’s elite, a place where the country’s top lawyers, judges, pollies, executives and media types relax and debate matters of import.

Dame Margaret Booth, a former
High Court judge, is its present chairman, and members have included Sir Winston
Churchill, and the spy and defector
Guy Burgess. You can see its quintessential clubby interior features in the swordfight sequence of the new James
Bond movie, Die Another Day.