KENSINGTON, LONDON– The Heckler has learned that London billionaire financier George Ainsworth still loves to eat gruel. Since his stunning financial success, Ainsworth has traded out his breeches and tattered newsboy cap for Ferragamo ties and Louboutin loafers; he’s replaced his dilapidated wooden pushcart for a cobalt blue Ferrari spider–yet, he still eats gruel three times a day.  Gruel constituted the entirety of his diet throughout his childhood as a dust-covered London orphan boy, and he just can’t seem to shake this routine.

Multiple sources have confirmed that Ainsworth’s 2,000 square meter office in his penthouse headquarters atop the majestic steel and glass skyline of London’s financial district, often smells as if someone’s recently eaten sweet, sweet gruel in there. Those who work with Ainsworth report that while his employees–themselves millionaires–leave each afternoon to white table cloth lunches, he closes his office door and at his desk, lowers his face into the wet steam of a tin bowl overflowing with hot, lumpy gruel. “He keeps asking me to prepare gruel!” complained chef Giacamo Dignelli, who left his Michelin-starred restaurant in Milan to be Ainsworth’s personal chef. “I don’t understand! How can a man of such means love a meal of such meagerness?!”

Princess Alexandra of the Luxembourg, who famously dated Ainsworth in the early 2000s, told the Heckler that Ainsworth sometimes asked to call her “Queen of Gruel” in the bedroom. She recalled a visit he made to the royal family’s vacation residence on Southern French beaches, where all he did was stay in the kitchen and try to make gruel. “It was rude and unfit for a man dating a princess,” said the princess.

Stock in Ainsworth Financial may be plummeting, but Ainsworth maintained in a public statement that this would not interrupt business-as-usual gruel production, adding that “there’s a pot on the stove as we speak.”