When BBC television star Nick Ross was revealed to have sold his Notting Hill home for a staggering £35 million, some over-excited Twitter users got the wrong end of the stick.
Following repeated questions from journalists and members of the public, the Crimewatch presenter’s namesake at the Corporation — political editor Nick Robinson — was forced to deny his wealth had catapulted him into the gilded ranks of footballers, celebrities and business leaders.
Robinson, 48, tweeted: “Just been rung by Sunday paper to comment on ‘news’ that I’m selling my house for £35m! Except I’m not (if only). They called the wrong Nick.
“So it was another Nick R selling the £35m house — at least according to Sunday Times. Ross not Robinson.”
One of his followers, Harry McGee, who replied: “I’m sure your house is worth much more than that!”
A quick trawl through publicly available records shows Robinson, who has led the BBC’s political coverage since 2005, is not in the same league as Ross when it comes to surfing the property market.
Soon after getting married in 1991, Robinson and wife Pippa moved into a flat in Chalk Farm. Later, they relocated to a family home in the shadow of Arsenal’s Emirates stadium to raise their three children. The Robinsons sold the property for £512,500, according to Land Registry documents, and upgraded to a four-storey terrace red-brick house in north London — once thought to have been owned by Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby. They paid £810,000 in 2005 but the house is now worth about £1.4 million, according to website Zoopla. Ross, on the other hand, is understood to have bought his white stucco detached home for a “knockdown” price of £950,000 during the 1993 housing slump — making an almost 4,000 per cent profit in the reported sale to Khaled Said, the 37-year-old son of Syrian-Saudi billionaire Wafic Said.
