Peer closes historic shoot where Mandy met Gaddafi
JUST as neighbouring Cliveden House was the backdrop to the Profumo affair, banker Lord Rothschild’s magnificent Buckinghamshire home, Waddesdon Manor, will forever be remembered as the venue for one of the most infamous political pow-wows of recent times.
Six years ago, it emerged that his lordship had hosted an extraordinary shooting weekend at the sumptuous ‘mini-Versailles’, where Peter Mandelson, then right-hand man of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, happily hobnobbed with Saif Gaddafi, son of Libya’s (yet-to-be-deposed) bloodthirsty dictator.
So in light of its notorious place in the political annals, I am intrigued to discover that visitors to one of the Home Counties’ most soughtafter shooting invitations — where guns can expect a four-figure haul of birds in one day — have now blasted their last pheasant. After 150 years of shooting on the 6,000-acre estate, Lord Rothschild (pictured below) has quietly decided to abandon the shoot.
‘That’s correct, the shoot was wound up,’ says a spokesman for the Waddesdon estate. ‘The estate is owned by Lord Rothschild, so the decision comes down to him at the end of the day — it has been his personal decision.’
Mandelson’s presence at the Waddesdon shoot alongside Gaddafi, described as the day’s ‘keenest shot’, angered relatives of those killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988 killing 270 people.
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing, was escorted by Saif Gaddafi to a hero’s welcome in Tripoli when he was controversially released in August 2009, just days after Mandelson had spent time with Saif at the Rothschild villa in Corfu.
While Waddesdon’s estate is owned by Lord Rothschild, the manor house was bequeathed to the National Trust by his cousin, James, in 1957. Although the Trust has angered countryside supporters by banning some hunts from its land, the spokesman insists the decision to end shooting at Waddesdon (above) has come from Lord Rothschild, 79. ‘I’ve been here for eight- and- a- half years and never had any problem with animal rights activists thankfully,’ adds the spokesman.