Madonna’s Guy speaks out for London’s beleaguered homebuyers

Guy Ritchie, the film director husband of Madonna, has spoken out for the thousands of first-time buyers struggling to get their first foot on the London property ladder, claiming that it's now virtually impossible to now buy a house in the city "unless you've got 10 million quid".

"There hasn't been a property correction here for 20 years," he told Empire magazine. "House prices don't go down, they just go up. And the natives of England are sort of being left behind because the big money came in and if it wanted something, it bought it and it made a bigger fortune by doing so," he said.

In the face of the credit crunch and the growing instability of the housing market, many will welcome Ritchie's words. Critics, however, might suggest that his and his wife’s own real estate portfolio - a £7m house in Marylebone, a £6m, 10-bedroom property next door and two mews cottages close to the Marylebone house – makes him an unlikely champion of non-property owning classes.