JENNI MURRAY: There’s one thing lacking from Raducanu’s lifetime of luxurious

I guess I was right in thinking Emma Raducanu’s phenomenal success at the US Open in 2021 was nothing more than a freak – a short bout of very good luck for a young, attractive, seemingly powerful tennis player.

Here she is this week, hoping to regain her title in New York and, presumably more of the goodies that go with it, only to be out in the first round and tear up at the press conference.

That’s not the way a champion behaves, Emma. Can you imagine Martina Navratilova making excuses because she’d lost a big game? No. She’d be up and at it, straight back to a court and her trainer, ready to work her wrist to death until she knew she was up to the job next time.

Emma did have the honesty to admit she needed to ‘manage my schedule differently’.

‘I would have preferred to probably play a little bit more before coming into the US Open,’ she said after the defeat, referring to her decision not to commit to any tournaments in the weeks leading up to the US Open.

Granted, Emma was young when she had that phenomenal grand slam success and could not have expected to become a multi-millionaire at the age of only 19.

Then came the endorsements. Nike of course jumped in quickly recognising the marketing potential of such an attractive young sporting star who would go on to win an MBE, BBC’s Sports Personality Of The Year and several other awards.

Then came the really flashy stuff. In September 21 she became an ambassador for Tiffany & Co and Dior. She signed with British Airways, Evian, Vodaphone, Porsche and HSBC bank. It must have boosted her ego enormously to have access to first class flight, free phones and plenty of bottled water, but what 19 year old athlete should be swanning around in Tiffany diamonds, Dior frocks and driving a Porsche instead of working hard with a coach she trusts to make sure her new position as Britain’s number one female tennis player is cemented.

Instead, less than two weeks after her US Open victory, she abandoned the coach who’d trained her to achieve that incredible victory. Several more coaches came and went.

Had Emma become too much of a pain, too full of herself for any coach to want to spend time training her? Did she have any time to spend doing what any successful sportsman or woman must do?

Being at the top of your game is all about working hard at fitness and technique to the exclusion of all else. It does not include time spent flogging products, however glamorous.

Emma has never been able to repeat the feat – or generate the adulation – she’d enjoyed in 2021. She’s played all over the world, including Wimbledon, but rarely seemed able to match that initial promise. First she was sick with Covid. Then there were a series of champsionships from which she retired early. In Monterrey it was ‘a small left leg injury’, then there were blisters on her hand and subsequent blister issues on her right foot. (You wouldn’t have thought that would be a problem for her given her connection with Nike.) At the Italian Open in 2022 she retired with a bad back.

On and on it went, with injury after injury leading to surgery on her ankle and both wrists and no return to fitness… until 2024 when she thought she was back.

She rehired a former coach but again pulled out of important matches. She managed to show up for Wimbledon, surviving as far as the fourth round, but not before she made the most appalling misjudgement that left many of us questioning how the one-time daling of the tennis world had become so spoiled and selfish.

She had agreed to play with Andy Murray in mixed doubles at Wimbledon. It was to be an emotional match – Andy’s last appearance on Centre Court – before he retired this summer. She pulled out, saying she had some stiffness in her right wrist and ‘needed to take care’.

Well, that worked out well for you, didn’t it Emma? Flat-out failure in New York after disappointing the kind of tennis hero you could never hope to be. If only she’d spent a little more time with Sir Andy, he might have taught her something of what it takes. He trained and trained, working his body hard from boyhood. There was hip surgery and back surgery, but he never gave up and never wasted time showing off any flashy endorsements. Emma could have learned a lot from him about strength, perseverance and practice rather than posing in front of Porsche.

My flat was on the 20th floor, the fire started on the first… 

When I was 27 and about to start a new job in regional television in Southampton, I lived for a while in a tiny flat on the 20th floor of a new tower block. I loved it. I had a balcony and wonderful views across the city. It never occurred to me to think of the potential dangers.

One evening, however, around 7pm, I was watching television when the fire alarm rang. I calmly assumed it must be a test. They happened all the time at work; maybe I could just stay put?

A lot of shouting and screaming soon made it clear this was no false alarm. I looked over the balcony and there was smoke puthering from what appeared to a first-floor window. I closed all my doors and win-dows and left, taking only my handbag with me.

I was young and fit; all those stairs presented no problem for me, but I had to help a woman with a small baby from my floor, then an elderly man trying to leave the 16th floor. The four of us slowly made it to the bottom.

Dozens gathered in the car park as the fire brigade arrived. By then smoke and flames had engulfed the first-floor flat where a chip pan fire was to blame.

Happily, the flames did not spread beyond this one flat. Clearly, we had no cladding on the building or the story might have been very different. The flames had emerged from the windows of the burning flat but had travelled neither upwards nor sideways.

I thought of this and my vow to never again live in a high-rise when I read of the two tower block fires within 24 hours this week.

Both in London, the first was at the seven-storey Spectrum Building in Dagenham, the second at the 45-storey New Providence Wharf skyscraper in Blackwall. It’s the second fire on that estate. The last one was in 2021.

There was ‘non-compliant cladding’ on the building at Dagenham which they had started to remove; and neighbours at Blackwall reported seeing cladding falling from the blazing building there. Has nothing been learned from the Grenfell tragedy of 2017?

I will never forget Grenfell. I happened to be driving on a dual carriageway nearby and could hardly be-lieve that such a tall building with 24 floors could be engulfed in flames from top to bottom. What, I wondered, could be happening to the poor people whose homes were high up?

I can only imagine what it must have been like for the young couple on the 23rd floor, told to stay and wait for a rescue which never came. They were among the 72 people who lost their lives and 70 more who were injured.

When it became clear that ¬cladding had been to blame for the spread of the fire it was assumed it would automatically be removed from any buildings where it existed. Surely no more lives would be put at risk by such an obvious failure of building regulations.

Of course, seven years later, it hasn’t happened. Earlier this week, it was revealed work to remove dan-gerous cladding has yet to begin at half the 4,600 blocks affected by the problem. Money in the pockets of the owners of such buildings is seemingly of more value than human life.

Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said the Dagenham blaze exposed a ‘national scandal’ of flammable cladding and deregulation in the building industry. He said warnings about building safety ‘have been ignored by public authorities and by central government’.

No one died in the two fires this week but two people were taken to hospital at Dagenham and more than 80 people were evacuated.

Across London, and I’m sure in every major city around the country, there are people living in fear. Many of them are young and bought a property thinking they were doing the right thing, getting on the housing ladder. They thought they’d be able to sell their lovely modern flat without any problems when they needed something bigger. They were wrong.

I have a number of friends and acquaintances, now in their 30s and 40s, who are stuck in tower blocks. There’s cladding on their buildings of which they knew nothing when they bought their one or two-bedroom flats. They are leaseholders so, of course, they don’t own the building. Have owners rushed to remove the cladding and keep their tenants safe? Of course they haven’t. It’s too expensive, they say.

The young people get together and form tenants’ associations. They try to work out if they could afford to do the removal themselves. Of course they can’t afford it, even as a collective.

No one will buy their flats. One has had a couple of children and wants to move somewhere with more room. It isn’t possible so they live in discomfort, with the constant fear their building could one day go up like the Towering Inferno.

Next Wednesday, the final report on the Grenfell Tower disaster will be published. We can only hope it won’t sit on a shelf somewhere and be ignored. It must force owners, government and public authorities to pull their fingers out and understand it’s their job to ensure everyone is safe in their home.

You’ll be bald soon enough, Oli

Sienna Miller, out with her twenty-something boyfriend, Oli Green, in St Tropez, doesn’t seem to mind his radical buzz cut. Why do young men shave off their luscious locks when, as everyone past middle age knows, they’ll be bald soon enough and longing for something to run a comb though? 

The PM’s words ‘Things will get worse before they get better’ have been ringing in my ears. Not that I’m panicking about the Budget. No. It’s my kitchen. The plan was a nice new work surface. Removing the old one revealed the accuracy of ‘things getting worse before they get better’. I’ve had no water, no oven, no washing machine… It’s hell. But I bet Sir Keir’s ‘worse’ won’t get better as quickly as mine will.

A survey has revealed a ‘DIY A&E epidemic’ – patients treating themselves in order to avoid long queues in casualty.

Don’t do it. Last year I tried to take care of a foot wound. Eventually I had to brave A&E. The consultant admitted me to ‘save you from sepsis and losing your foot’. The wait was worth it.

The walk-on girls can walk right off again

Six years ago it was decided that ‘walk-on girls’ would no longer be required at darts competitions on TV.

Now they’re back – all big hair, big breasts and tiny dresses. I wonder what top-class female darts players such as four-time world champion Lisa Ashton or Fallon Sherrock MBE make of that?