"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.

Related items on this website:

  Sydney Morning Herald (Melbourne): First we take Newcastle, then we take Berlin

  Protests as Evening Standard reports Mr Irving is to be barred from London's Clubland

  Reform Club, which banned Irving, puts his book in Library

  The model turned society queen, a tarnished Holocaust historian and a disturbingly unsavoury anti-Semitic email

  The Times calls Mr Irving: An unreformed character (ho ho).

  "London's Reform Club fails to expel Lady Renouf over support for Mr Irving | Radical's Diary: Two Legal Victories in England hint at Turn of Tide