By CHRISTOPHER WILSON

Angus Ogilvy was a weak man, so perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me when he called me at home one summer morning and burst into tears.

He represented, to outward appearances, everything good about the British upper classes: son of an earl, old Etonian, ex-Guards officer and Oxford graduate, dazzlingly handsome. And, crucially, married to Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Princess Alexandra.

When the two A’s married in 1963 they suffered an uncomfortable moment or two thanks to photographer Ray Bellisario, an Italian ice cream salesman’s son and the first of Britain’s paps. Bellisario captured the moment when Angus and Alexandra, honeymooning at Balmoral, did what all honeymooners do. In the heather, by the River Dee.

Britain still stood in complete deference to the royal family, so when I arrived in Fleet Street six years later this act of desecration, of blithe disregard of the sanctity of marriage, the right to a private life and so on and so forth, was still spoken of in hushed tones. At the Daily Mail I was told that Belisario’s negatives of the moment of royal love lay securely in a safe in the editor’s office. Meanwhile the perp pap had fled the country, and on his return found himself blacklisted by every British newspaper.

You’d think that would be enough excitement for this square-jawed, rangy, beautifully elocuted aristocrat who wore his jacket sleeves too short; but apparently not. As the younger son of the Earl of Airlie he was expected to make his own way – and while marrying a princess could be marked down as ‘job done’, Ogilvy felt it important that he should find a job and provide enough income to support his young family.

It led him astray, and into the arms of Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, a buccaneering multinational tycoon whose company Lonrho handed Angus a seat on the board and a comfortable stipend. The problem was that Rowland was a crook on an epic scale, and in 1976 Angus was criticised in a Department of Trade report as being part of the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’. He promptly quit business life and turned to charitable good deeds to try to make amends, his princess wife being revered in much the same way plaster saints are in Catholic churches.

A few years later, Lonrho were again in deep water and Angus’s name was once again being dragged through the mud. One morning at the Daily Express I lifted my phone to a man called Paul Spicer, right-hand man to the odious Rowland and, despite his own upper-crust credentials, just as crooked.

“You will be pleasantly surprised to hear that Angus Ogilvy is rejoining the board of Lonrho,” he purred. “No need to check – just go ahead and print it.”

So disgraced was Angus by his City defenestration that this seemed about as likely as seeing Prince Philip dressed in drag blowing kisses to the crowds from the Buckingham Palace balcony. Plus the old alarm bells always ring whenever anybody says “No need to check.”

So I checked.

And he denied it. “I have no intention of rejoining Lonrho – now or ever,” he spluttered, “it’s a lie.” So we published the story as further evidence Rowland’s chicanery, and that was that.

Until the next day, a Saturday. I’d just taken my girls to fearsome Mrs Hodgkiss’s music school and was enjoying a cup of coffee when the phone rang.

“Mr Wilson, this is Angus Ogilvy,” he said, sounding wretched. “I’m sorry to inform you that an article will appear in the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow refuting your story about Lonrho. I’m really sorry but…” and his voice trailed off.

“Really?” I said. “When we talked a couple of days ago that sounded to me like a pretty straightforward denial. You also denied various other points made by Spicer – that Rowland had visited you in hospital recently, that he was a frequent visitor to your home Thatched House Lodge. All that – are you saying you made it up? Or that I got it wrong?”

That was when Sir Angus Ogilvy, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Privy Councillor, esteemed member of the Royal Family and doughty former captain in the Scots Guards, burst into tears.

“You don’t know…” he blithered, “you just don’t know what they can do. What they can do to me... ! I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but…” and with that the phone went dead.

Next day the lickspittle deputy City editor of the Sunday Telegraph and favoured Lonrho mouthpiece Ian Watson trashed my story. Or did his best to.

He quoted Ogilvy direct in a pusillanimous litany of I-didn’t-really-quite-say-that phrases which failed to convince the shrewder reader, but presumably dampened Rowland’s notoriously fearsome rage – and there the matter rested.

Angus Ogilvy never did rejoin the board of Lonrho. He never saw Tiny Rowland again. But all the same he was an unreliable witness – during our first conversation he denied ever knowing Paul Spicer, the bringer of glad tidings to the William Hickey column.

I later discovered they were chums at Eton together.

14 July 2026