Georgian soap magnates and Russian oligarchs – joined in grand absurdity

Why did Andrei Guriev, or early 20th-century industrialist Arthur Crosfield and his family of just three, want to buy Witanhurst house - London's biggest residence, besides Buckingham Palace, with 25 bedrooms and 365 windows?

Highgate these days is full of Russians," my friend Diana Athill said recently as we drove past the steep lane that leads to the cemetery and the grave of Karl Marx. Diana is rather old - she was born only a few weeks after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace - so you might say that her life has spanned every jump in modern Russian history, from the last tsar to Lenin, from Lenin to Stalin, from Stalin to Gorbachev and from Gorbachev to Putin; though by "Russians" she meant the most recent, oligarchical kind rather than those who, down the hill 30 years ago, would queue in their badly made suits to lay their official bouquets beside Marx's great bronze head. Of course, both kinds of Russians are often the same people in different guise: apparatchiks whom historical opportunity has turned into plutocrats.

Diana said she'd once asked a taxi driver if he ever drove any Russians. "He replied, 'No, but I often drive their cooks."' She laughed at this. Despite their prominence in conversation, Highgate's Russians are unobtrusive as pedestrians, pub goers and frequenters of the local shops, possibly because they are too rich for any of these ordinary activities. Theirs is the world of the bodyguard and the black-glass limousine. A few of the big names are known, including Alisher Usmanov, who is ranked third by Forbes in its list of Russian billionaires, and owns a regency villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath. But easily the most visible evidence of Russian wealth is an enormous house called Witanhurst, which stands only a few hundred yards from the high street, and for the past five years has been surrounded by scaffolding, shipping containers and Portakabins - evidence of its extravagant remodelling for an anonymous owner, of whom until this week nothing was known, other than the likelihood that he or she was Russian.