Standing in the bathroom of Britain’s richest plumber is quite a surreal experience. For the record, the taps are gleaming and Charlie Mullins has a freestanding, oval white tub with a full-frontal view of the MI6 building opposite. Does he still do his own plumbing? “No!” he says, aghast. He can certainly afford not to.
In September last year Mullins sold his company, Pimlico Plumbers, to the US home services group Neighborly. He started the business from a basement in south London in 1979 and it became the capital’s largest independent plumbing company — charging £120 an hour — and was known for taking care of the leaking taps and burst pipes of Simon Cowell, Dame Helen Mirren, Joanna Lumley, Joan Collins, Keira Knightley and Daniel Craig. Reports on how much he sold it for vary; so what’s the true figure? “I’m not supposed to say it was £148 million. They told me not to say it,” says Mullins, 69, with a mischievous grin. Saying things he probably shouldn’t is his speciality. He revels in being politically incorrect and regularly plumbs the depths with his revealing “jokes”.
Everything Mullins has done for the past 40 years has been defined by his company, “but now I can just be myself,” he says. The first thing he did was buy the riverside flat he was renting in Pimlico. It occupies an entire floor, with a wraparound balcony and far-reaching views over the city; he bought it for £10 million. The singer Tom Jones lives upstairs and his other famous neighbours, according to Mullins, include “the carpet guy” — Carpetright millionaire Lord Harris — and “the wallpaper guy” — Lord Brownlow, who helped to pay for the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat.
Mullins’s son, Scott, kept a 10 per cent share in the company after the sale and stayed on as chief executive but “he’s now had enough of them, basically — the Americans. I had ten family members there and the last two went recently, two son-in-laws. The last Mullinses have left the building.”
So what is Mullins without Pimlico Plumbers? With his spikey blond hair, sinewy stature and gleaming white teeth, he is often mistaken for Rod Stewart. On a recent trip to LA shop staff were so convinced he was the singer, they closed the doors so he could browse in peace.
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Mullins, however, wants you to know who he is as soon as you step into his hallway. It’s lined with framed pictures and autographs from people he admires, from Margaret Thatcher to Michael Jackson. “Well, I don’t admire him any more, obviously, but he was a great artist,” he says. Elvis Presley is there, Vera Lynn, the Queen; the only one missing is Donald Trump, apparently. “He makes things happen,” Mullins says with a shrug. “He doesn’t sit on the fence.”
Taking pride of place on the hallway table are four framed photographs; Mullins with the past three Conservative prime ministers and Prince Charles. What’s he like? “Oh, I dunno, he just talks to me about boilers and that,” Mullins says. “He was really my favourite one,” he says, pointing at David Cameron. Mullins had a very public falling out with the Conservatives over Brexit, to which he was so opposed he erected a “Bollocks to Brexit” sign over the Pimlico office. He stopped donating to the party but says, “We’re still friends. I think [Brexit] was a bad move but I think they will reverse it eventually.”
He occasionally talks to Johnson, he says, but he worked with Cameron on apprenticeships. “Theresa May is Theresa May, ain’t she? I mean, you wouldn’t want one at home like her, would you?”
Twice divorced, Mullins met his girlfriend, RaRa, 31, a singer whose real name is Rachel Leavesley, in Marbella. She flies out to Nashville soon to record her album, Biker Boy, and the walls are plastered with photos of her with famous people, from Gail Porter to Nigel Farage. She has her own bedroom in the apartment, with a Versace duvet that matches Mullins’s in the principal suite.
We move into the living room, which is dominated by a grey sectional sofa, bespoke rock-like cabinetry and a jukebox with a painting of Winston Churchill above it. They’re expecting a new bar soon, but the present one is propped up by Eric, a bronze skeleton protectively grasping two bottles of Moët. “What happened was, he stopped paying rent so we stopped feeding him.” Most telling of all is a sketch by the Daily Mail cartoonist Stanley McMurtry showing village folk gazing at a Palladian mansion captioned: “The Lord of the Manor? — no, that’s the local plumber”.
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Proud of his humble beginnings on a Camden council estate, Mullins looked up to the local plumber, “who had a house, car, motorbike, holiday, nice clothes”. He took up an apprenticeship when he was 15. “That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I was told by the plumber that if you get an apprenticeship in a trade, you’ll never be out of work and you’ll have loads of money.”
He hopes to inspire similar success in others and thinks jobs are the key to solving all of society’s ills. He is not a fan of benefits for the “capable” unemployed, believing they incentivise people not to work, but he backs government-funded apprenticeships. He says: “Basically the people that cause problems now are the people with no work. They say they’ve got nothing to do. And you don’t get many people that go to work that stab people.”
Get ready to hear many more of his political views; he says he has a “frank, fierce and fun” column in a national newspaper lined up — although declines to say which one — and regular appearances on Great British Radio, a new station launching next month with him as chairman.
And Mullins still plans to run as an independent candidate for mayor of London in two years. Turning empty shops into affordable homes for key workers is a “no-brainer”, he says, and he is particularly irate about cycle lanes, which he blames for congesting London’s roads. “It’s just not working for London. I mean, cycle lanes . . .” he says.
Mullins bought his first house in Lewisham, southeast London, for £9,000 in 1974, “with a 100 per cent mortgage off the council. I don’t know if they still do that,” he says. He sold it for £23,000. “I bought bungalows, redone them, bought another one, then ended up in Keston Park [in Bromley, southeast London], which is the most prime place there. We had two houses — I bought the one next door and sold that with planning permission, so I’ve always been involved in property.”
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He bought a villa in Marbella 12 years ago, but plans to buy a second one in Spain and a plot to build another for his family to enjoy, plus a £26 million new-build in Dubai. But, surely, he won’t be able to spend much time there if he’s mayor of London? “You’re not mayor at the weekend, are you?” he replies.
The third bedroom in his apartment is used as a home office. Mullins isn’t a fan of WFH — “I call it WLFH; work less from home” — and he gave his office staff a £20 a day bonus, free food and drink and free parking to entice them back after the lockdown. “Kids seeing their parents working from home, they’ll think it’s normal, hanging about in your pyjamas.”
Appearance is everything to Mullins, who believes he changed the image of plumbing from a “back entrance” trade to a more respectable one. He made a list of all the common criticisms such as “turning up late, not finishing the job, scruffy bastard, rusty old van, never giving the price, not transparent, not cleaning up after the job” and set out to do the opposite. He is still surprised at how many tradesmen’s vans he sees with no signage. “Our biggest advertisement was our vans. You could be the best plumbing company, but if no one knows about you, there’s no point.”
Now he’s free of the firm, Mullins has to contend with the much harder job of reinventing himself.
