Dashwood: Park life for Richard Caring's £20m new neighbour 5 Hertford Street house guest feels at home Did you read the story of the Chinese couple who refused to move home to make way for a new road and ended up living on a roundabout? Dashwood brings you the Mayfair comparison - the lady who won't move out of her flat in the block of ten Georgian townhouses that have been converted into Robin Birley's £28m members club 5 Hertford Street. Her flat was one of two still standing when Birley took over the near-derelict site - but while the other owner sold to make way for Birley, Dashwood's home-loving heroine, who lives on the south-eastern side of the block opposite Curzon Street, stayed put. Indefinitely. But his house-guest doesn't bother Birley. "It is not as though there is a pressing demand for space in the club, as there are plenty of empty rooms on the third and fourth floors," says one source. The changing of the guard continues at Fat Face, the "active lifestyle" clothing brand. Two days before it was announced that former M&S chairman Sir Stuart Rose is to succeed Alan Giles as chairman, Fat Face finance director Emily Tate handed in her resignation. Ms Tate is currently on gardening leave after posting her P45 on February 1, Diary understands, and will re-emerge at Ivy League-style brand Jack Wills - although the reason for her exit is unclear. "Why is she going now, when the results are so good?" wondered one observer, referring to Fat Face's 11pc sales growth to £85.7m for the 26 weeks to December 1 2012. A bigger job - and a bigger pay cheque - presumably. Ex-Brothers close in for punch-up Andrew Merrett and Martin Gudgeon go back a long way - Gudgeon used to be Merrett's boss when the restructuring specialists worked at Close Brothers. The pair went their separate ways, with Gudgeon moving on to Blackstone Group and Merrett to Rothschild. Now the long-lost brothers are reunited - but on opposite sides of the Punch Taverns punch-up. Gudgeon is representing Punch Taverns Plc in the scrap over debt restructuring, as part of the Blackstone-Goldman Sachs advisory team. Merrett's firm Rothschild is advising the Association of British Insurers, which has corralled the senior bondholders that Punch must persuade to sign up to its proposed compromise agreement. Can the pair's Close history speed up that negotiation? A novel variation of the "dog ate my homework" excuse from former BGC Partners analyst Louise Cooper. "I spent three hours writing a piece about Mark Carney," said Ms Cooper on her Cooper City blog after the Bank of England governor-elect's Q&A with the Treasury Select Committee. But sadly the new kitten deleted it. She stood on the keyboard and my work disappeared. Luigi the cat is still in the dog-house after taking a stand against Carney's monetary policy. "Not many" of her nine lives are intact, says Cooper. Boris's £1.3bn plot to snare Sarkozy Those rumours that Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni are looking to flee France's 75pc tax rate by moving to London are, sadly, just rumours. Dashwood understands that the former French president made it clear at the private dinner hosted by Barclays at Davos last month that he has no intention of making such a move. It's just as well, Boris Johnson told the Chartered Institute of Housing this week. If the celebrity pair did take the plunge, they would "join the hordes of well-heeled international investors who have pushed prices so high that millions of Londoners cannot afford the cost of housing." Instead, the Mayor of London wants to use the capital's £1.3bn stamp duty receipts to fund a million new homes - a plan that would enable the Sarkozys" "aromatherapist ... and the chauffeur who drives them" to afford to live close to their employers. Might chinchilla-clad Carla and her Cuban-heeled paramour reconsider?