A match made in celebrity heaven
The engagement is announced between bad boy Spencer and risqué Vogue... it’s DEFINITELY
AFTER years spent clubbing and womanising it seems serial playboy Spencer Matthews is ready to leave his louche life behind and settle down with Vogue Williams. Spencer, 28, and Vogue, 32, met on a reality TV show, share an agent, and have just announced their engagement in a very modern way – by posting the news on Instagram.
The Made In Chelsea star presented the Fade Street performer with a diamond ring, said to be worth up to €200,000, after proposing at a production of The Lion King in London. True to form for a couple who make endless posts on social media, Vogue was soon showing off the ring to her online fans.
Vogue will be marrying into the extended circle of Britain’s royal family when she ties the knot with Matthews whose brother James is married to Pippa Middleton – making Vogue Pippa’s future sister-in-law.
And the relatively low-profile Middletons could be in for a shock. Vogue’s love of publicity is such that she couldn’t make Pippa’s wedding – Spencer delivered the best man’s speech – due to an engagement at Arnotts department store, where she was hawking her fitness and beauty book.
Spencer George Matthews is the third son of landowner David Matthews, from his second marriage to Jane Spencer Parker, a Zimbabwean artist.
David became a millionaire several times over running a car dealership. He and Jane had three sons, James, Michael and Spencer. When he retired, David Matthews bought the Eden Rock Hotel in St Barts, and Spencer spent happy teenage years here. In his 2013 autobiography, Confessions Of A Chelsea Boy, he talked about spending the summer when he was 16 experimenting with cocaine and trying out the island’s nightclubs. He worked as a nightclub promoter and in the hotel. After a brief stint as a city trader, Spencer decided he wanted to be famous. He made his name as a ladies man on the inane reality TV show Made In Chelsea and revelled in being one of Britain’s most talked-about bachelors. He shrugged off allegations of cocaine snorting and claims he lost his virginity at 13 and has bedded 1,000 women. He survived a crash in a Lamborghini during the Dodgeball Rally, a rich kids car race across Europe, and was redtop fodder as stories of his bed-hopping became legend. But even after stepping aside from E4’s ‘structured reality’ show about posh 20-somethings inhabiting the affluent postcodes of West London Spencer remains a favourite of the celebrity circuit. He and his fellow Made In Chelsea stars have a cult following among the show’s young fans and enjoy an enviable lifestyle of luxury travel and lucrative personal appearances, minutely detailed in Instagram posts and social media chit-chat. It
‘Vogue will marry into extended royal family when she ties the knot’
is all a long way from what he describes as the ‘modest and discreet’ life of his big brother James, who has made a small fortune, first as a derivatives trader in the City of London and later from the property market and hedge funds.
Friends of Spencer, who is 13 years younger than his brother, say that while he possesses all the smooth charm of an ex-Eton boy, he has not yet turned that into the kind of hard cash that has made James such a success. Certainly Spencer looked up to his three siblings, Nina, James and Michael, who tragically died on Everest hours after becoming the youngest Briton to conquer the peak.
‘As a boy, I wanted Nina’s heart of gold, Mike’s general character and James’s girlfriends,’ Spencer wrote in his autobiography, Confessions Of A Chelsea Boy.
When his memoir was published in 2013, Spencer’s bed-hopping was almost overshadowed by other more eye-catching revelations. It told in vulgar detail how Spencer had dabbled with cocaine and LSD, spent almost every night for months on end drinking and cavorting in nightclubs, while enjoying countless sexual liaisons. One such encounter descended into a group sex session with six participants, including a man who attempted to perform a sex act on him which, he said, was ‘not my thing’.
As for his drug-taking, he recalls of his first episode: ‘I knew taking cocaine wasn’t right . . . and like most parents, mine had warned me away from drugs. But sometimes people want to experience things for themselves.’
Since leaving Made In Chelsea, Spencer has calmed down. But the showy side of his life is still there and trouble still seems to follow him around. In 2015, he was forced to quit ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here after it emerged he had an addiction to steroids. A year earlier he had been filmed snorting white powder at a party.
He was linked to Topshop tycoon Sir Philip Green’s daughter Chloe, model Funda Onal and his Made In Chelsea co-star Caggie Dunlop.
If nothing else, the marriage of the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister Pippa to the brother of a reality TV star demonstrates the broadening horizons of the 21st century royal family – who are now set to welcome Vogue into the fold.