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Money-grabbing Fergie and the book that could bring down the Royal Family

A few days ago my diamante-encrusted iPhone trilled; it was a call on behalf of Sarah, Duchess of York whom I had had to sack six months ago after 35 years of friendship. Would I try to find out what the author Andrew Lownie is writing about Fergie and her ex in his new biography of the grasping duo?

 

Lownie is an acclaimed author and historian who has written meticulously researched, serious books on, among others, the Mountbattens, Guy Burgess and the awful Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They are the polar opposite of quick cuttings jobs and, in the case of the Mountbattens, he spent £350,000 of his own money unsuccessfully trying to have the couple’s secret papers released. Numerous Freedom of Information attempts were met with a brick wall erected by a combination of Whitehall and Buck House apparatchiks in the very institutions we pay for with our taxes.

 

I have known and admired Andrew Lownie for 10 years or more and agreed to introduce Fergie to him because she told me she would co-operate with his biography in order to give the York’s side of the story. Our meeting went well for an hour or more, lots of Mwah Mwahs and empty promises before she left in a chauffeured Range Rover for the dentist. Within an hour the word went out from Royal Lodge: do not co-operate with this man.

 

Last year Fergie saw a YouTube video podcast of Lownie talking about his proposed biography and hinted at some of what he had already discovered; she went potty, blaming me as well because of my friendship with him, even though I knew nothing about the video, and when I eventually saw it found it factual and far from sensational. So off my Christmas card list she went.

 

Well, let me assure the Yorks that when Lownie’s book is published later this year it will be an honest account based on countless interviews and relentless trawling through documents. It will prove yet again that the couple have a voracious appetite for other people’s money.  So much so that he believes it is a scandal far greater than the York’s ill-fated friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and could bring huge damage to the Royal Family. “Maybe even bring it down,” says Lownie.

 

It’s not just the money they crave but where it comes from which is so scandalous; dodgy oligarchs and now a Chinese spy. But to be fair to the couple, the love of money and the donors who give it, starry-eyed by the association with royals, is shared by the family. The King, as Prince Charles, was forever offering dinner to anyone who would pay for the ‘privilege’, usually around £20,000. His former fixer, Michael Fawcett, was known to collect vast sums (in one instance it was £1 million in a plastic carrier bag) and when Charles’s foundation borrowed £20 million to purchase Dumfries House in Scotland, it came as a loan from his charities under the foundation’s umbrella.

 

Leaving aside the dubious idea of borrowing from charities, in my view from experience as a trustee of two brilliant charities, an utterly outrageous and possible unlawful thing to do, he then went round with a begging bowl for help to try to repay the money. Why didn’t he put his hand in his own very deep pockets himself instead of relying on the rich but stupid, anxious for a royal dinner or honour?

 

Now the Sunday Times exposes the case of Dartmoor Prison which has lain empty of lags for six months because of toxic gas fears, but still pays Prince William’s Duchy of Cornwall £1.5 million a year under a lease agreement with the Ministry of Justice. In other words, it’s our money paying the Duchy which in turn goes straight to the bank account of one of the richest men in the country. For his personal use. Worse, we are responsible for paying up to £68 million for repairs to the prison.

    

You don’t have to be a Republican to ask what’s the point of the Royals. Countless properties unoccupied for most of the year (Buckingham and Kensington palaces alone have 1,300 rooms), almost 500,000 acres of land, rows and rows of medals that haven’t been earned, feathers and sashes and capes from the dressing-up box... it’s all so bloody Ruritanian. It is also entirely one-sided. And please don’t write under a silly name to the Drone Letters Page that the monarchy brings in the tourists, just remember that most of Europe and the US don’t have a monarchy but somehow manage to have vast tourist industries.

 

If the Yorks don’t bring down the institution on their own, then root and branch reform is desperately needed. Just don’t hold your breath.

 

*****   

 

The Mail has done much crowing about its World Exclusive, the Unity Mitford diaries in which the stupid woman writes breathlessly about her darling friend Adolf Hitler. Last Saturday the paper devoted 15 pages to its coup. Here’s hoping they are not proved to be an elaborate hoax because, when it comes to Hitler and Diaries, there’s some form.

 

We all remember the embarrassment suffered by the Sunday Times in 1983 when it bought serialisation rights to the so-called Hitler Diaries. The distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, an independent director of Times Newspapers, was tasked with verifying them, which he did, despite which they turned out to be the invention of one Konrad Kujau and were totally fraudulent from start to finish.

 

At about 7am on May 18, 1977 I was on the back bench of the old Evening News reading with increasing scepticism that morning’s Daily Mail front page, produced just one floor above in Northcliffe House. The editor of the News, Louis Kirby, and I had migrated downstairs three years earlier and were great fans of our former home. But surely this time something was very wrong.

 

The Splash headline was WORLD-WIDE BRIBERY WEB BY LEYLAND and the sub head Exclusive: Exposed – the amazing truth about Britain’s State-owned car makers.

 

Only it wasn’t. The story alleged that British Leyland, maker of Jaguar, Land Rover and other cars and buses, had been paying governments around the world vast sums from a so-called slush fund to encourage the wholesale ordering of its vehicles. In the year before, the total had been £20 million, worth almost 10 times that today. The story was predicated on a letter from Lord Ryder, chairman of the National Enterprise Board, which owned shares in Leyland, to BL ceo Alex Park.

 

My problem when reading the reproduced letter in that day’s Mail was the poor use of English and several spelling mistakes. It just didn’t seem right. And it wasn’t. I urged caution and we were careful in our follow-up. Within hours it emerged that the letter was a fraud, written by a Leyland executive, Graham Barton, who spent the rest of that day being questioned at the Yard. The daft thing was most of the allegations in the ‘letter’ were later proved to be true but, in an attempt to embellish the facts, Barton had written this make-believe letter and the Mail had failed to do any routine checks.

 

David English published a grovelling apology and offered his resignation to Lord Rothermere, which was refused. He went on to be a towering force in Fleet Street. And the author of that great exclusive? Why our old friend Slippery Stewart Steven, the former Express exec who five years earlier brought us the Martin Boorman Found Alive hoax.   

 

But proving the old adage that nothing succeeds like failure, the accident-prone Steven later became editor of the Standard and then the Mail on Sunday.

 

*****

 

Highlight of the Trump inauguration? Melania’s hat with its brim so wide the Orange Manbaby couldn’t even get within distance for a decent air kiss. Was this her version of the modern day chastity belt?


ALAN FRAME


22 January 2025