Sting, Trudie Styler and those fucking truffles

Like an astronomer who thinks he’s detected a new distant galaxy far far away, Madame Arcati’s own eye is drawn increasingly to the supernova of a new Monster Couple and the burgeoning number of stories that suggest Trudie Styler and her husband Sting might benefit from a stint as street sweeps (preferably in a crime-ridden downtown district).

Styler is in the news today. She’s been taken to an employment tribunal by a former chef for unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination: the panel has already upheld Jane Martin’s former claim and will rule on the latter.

Martin’s account of working for the Stylers (or the Stings or the Sumners – I love multi-branding) is delightfully harrowing: any minute now Bette Davis will be disinterred for a comeback performance as the bitch chatelaine. Samples: “Staff are terrified of wife’s temper”; and: Styler “subjects staff to gratuitous abuse to make her feel royal”.

Perhaps my favourite: “Martin regularly ordered truffles by motorcycle dispatch from France and travelled 100 miles just to make soup for Miss Styler."

Did I imagine that she and Sting founded the Rainforest Foundation which, inter alia, “runs campaigns that seek to address the underlying causes of the destruction of tropical rainforests.”? I should think that sending out for truffles by motorcycle is most definitely a pre-environmentalism behaviour – just think of the size of those truffles’ carbon footprints alone.

Of course, Martin could be making all this up. But I doubt it. She was in Styler’s employ for 8 years and cooked for the likes of Madonna and Elton John – so she’s no obvious fly-by opportunist. And having observed Styler on Lorraine Kelly’s TV show the other day and scanned that surgically re-upholstered pretty face of hers – with one wrinkle cosmetically etched in for age-related credibility – I would say this is a face used to control, from the blocking false smiles and insolent legs-wide-apart pose to the repeated slow half-blinks to signal: “Don’t go there, Lorraine!”

And then there’s Sting himself, a taller variant on Bono as a bringer of peace (non-Pope division). Back In January it was reported that he had ordered the demolition of a distant fishing hut on the neighbouring Great Durnford Manor because it tarnished his view from a bedroom window on his 800-acre Lake House in Wiltshire. It then emerged he had built a barn that turned out to be considerably larger than that indicated in plans submitted to the local council.

Of course Sting is a tax exile and not at his UK estate very often – his summer residence is in Tuscany, the massive Pallagio estate, a few miles south of Florence, “where staff produce his own brands of olive oil and wine - products which also feature in their organic Christmas hampers.”

That at least helps to reduce his wife’s incontinent carbon heft.