Wedding singer Sting witnesses that the Russians love their children too

Once more to House Sting, that musical powerbase whose extensive global property portfolio means the sun never sets on its yoga mats. Headed by the eponymous troubadour and his wife Trudie Styler, House Sting is widely regarded as one of 21st-century Earth’s most savagely self-parodic entities. Committed eco-warriors Sting and Trudie are as at home dismissing a pregnant chef for being too ill to travel from Wiltshire to London to make them some soup or something as they are organising summits at their Tuscan estate, where the aim is “to rethink how change happens in our society”. (Short answer: not like this.)

As some older readers may recall, Lost in Showbiz was once accused of “class envy” by Trudie for drawing attention to her use of what madam refers to as “private aviation fuel” (it’s not the same as the stuff in the planes you fly in). And this week, dispatches out of Moscow remind us that those essential jet rides don’t pay for themselves, even for someone whose personal wealth is estimated at £180m.

We lay our scene at the wedding of the son of Russian billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev, whose perfectly manicured Wikipedia entry describes him primarily as “an Ingush-Russian entrepreneur, businessmen and poet”. I’m imagining a particularly malarial version of Pam Ayres, but go on. “He also holds a degree in athletics for the decathlon.” The rest is an everyday story of arrest warrants issued and cancelled, petrochemical firms and media outlets acquired, forcibly sold and reacquired, and the receipt of ominous-sounding medals such as “The Order of Friendship” and “Distinction in Special Operations”. To slightly misquote his brother in track and field, Daley Thompson: I haven’t laughed so much since my grandmother caught her tit in the mangle.

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Khadija Uzhakhova – and a lot of flowers. Photograph: Instagram

Anyway, congrats to Mikhail, whose son Said married one Khadija Uzhakova in Moscow last weekend. To describe the event as extravagant is to observe that the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace is not entirely minimalist. The wedding was so tumultuously, dementedly floral that it made the Chelsea flower show look like a petrol station forecourt at five to midnight on Valentine’s Day.

In the end, though, nothing says “I could buy every one of my guests” like your choice of wedding singer. And, for a rumoured million each, the line-up comprised Ms Jennifer Lopez, Mr Enrique Iglesias and the aforementioned Mr Gordon Sting. You are now cordially invited to examine the photos of the artistes, which – despite the probable assurances of privacy handed out to them – have found their way out to various media.

It’s a partial credit for Enrique, as he is wearing the precise uniform he would don if he were planning to do a spot of shopping and was desperate not to be recognised. Couple of T-shirts, jeans and a baseball cap pulled down so low that he could perfectly well have sent an Enrique Iglesias impersonator to do the gig and his paymasters would have been none the wiser. As for J-Lo, she looks to be grinding through her set in the same perfunctory style in which she might submit to a colonic or inform a backing dancer she was marrying him.

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The honour guard inspired by Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Photograph: Instagram

But Sting … oh man. Sting has really shown up to this thing. It’s unclear why he is holding a bouquet – perhaps the terms of his contract required him to perform two medleys then spend the rest of the night functioning as part of the flower help. Still, just look at his little face. He’s really going the extra mile for his cheque – chatting to the groom as though his life depended on it. Which would, of course, be preposterous. As for what Sting is saying, maybe he’s giving this nice young man some fine wine tips, or explaining that in the much less civilised west, everyone laughs at you if your wife takes a private jet stuffed with essentials such as an entourage or personal hairdresser merely to attend a party less than three hours’ train-ride away. And when they do mock you, you can’t even imprison them or strip them of their assets.

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As for the expression of the groom himself, you will certainly recognise it. We’ve all worn it at weddings, usually when we find ourselves cornered by some unspeakable bore of a relative with halitosis and a thousand wanks over Margaret Thatcher under his belt. If there were a speech bubble above Said’s head, I think it would read: “That is hugely interesting – would you like me to go and get you another drink, even though we both know Captain Cook is more likely to return from Hawaii than I am from that particular expedition?”

All in all, this is my favourite “off-diary” Sting gig since he took a million to perform for a family literally accused of boiling its enemies. That was back in 2010, when he got in a little metaphorical hot water himself for pitching up in Uzbekistan to collect a large cheque from the daughter of presidential tyrant Islam Karimov, whose horrors are deplored almost hourly by the UN, Amnesty and those generally against things such as the slaughter of innocents, the 80% draining of an entire sea, and boasting the world’s second-highest rate of human slavery.

Notionally in town to headline its arts festival, Sting declined to defend himself by saying he had given his fee to charity or whatnot, instead explaining that he was against cultural boycotts as they rob proscribed states of “the open commerce of ideas and art”. To which the only reasonable retort was: you appeared at an event for which tickets cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan, as well as sitting dutifully alongside the president’s daughter at the launch of her luxury jewellery line. Or did you go busking with your lute among the ordinary people as well? Alas, all Sting would insist was: “The concert was organised by the president’s daughter and I believe sponsored by Unicef.”

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Why on earth he should believe that when it was obvious rubbish is unclear. I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but my feeling is that Unicef does not tend to sponsor events put on by regimes accused of conscripting armies of children for slave labour. I seem to remember the Lord’s Resistance Army getting a knock back when they approached the charity to underwrite the Kony Royal Variety Performance.

Back to the Moscow nuptials, though, as there are still a lot of things I don’t understand about the wedding. For instance, the honour guard comprising men apparently dressed as an albino version of Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Another puzzle is the handbag the bride carries all the way to the altar. Shortly after her husband received his OBE at Buckingham Palace in 2003, it was Victoria Beckham who most pertinently wondered why the Queen carried a handbag, considering she was in her own house. Similarly, you would think one of the 38,000 staff at this wedding could have carried Khadija’s phone/lipstick/cash for the pay-bar around for her.

All in all, I think the best way for me to make sense of this shitshow would be if Sting wrote a song about it. Actually, scratch that. I demand a full concept album about the event, for which Sting specifically learns the balalaika, and for which he will win seven Russian Grammys. Working title: Fees of Gold.

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