Indignities at Heathrow heaped on Lady Mancham

AS THE widow of a knight of the realm, Lady Mancham might expect the red carpet treatment on her visits to Britain.

Sadly, the wife of the first Seychelles president, Sir James Mancham, was subjected to what she describes as a ‘humiliating’ five-hour interrogation by Border Force officers at Heathrow on Saturday.

Known as Catherine Olsen when she was a writer, Lady Mancham (pictured with Sir James), has an Australian passport as well as an expired one with a stamp giving her ‘ leave to enter the UK for an indefinite period’.

But, unbeknown to her, the rules changed in 2014, making the stamp invalid.

‘I lived here for 25 years,’ she tells me. ‘I have had two British husbands and have two children with British passports and was treated like a criminal. I felt I was in Stalin’s Russia.’

Lady Mancham, 74, whose husband was given a state funeral after his death in January, adds: ‘ They went through my luggage, took away my handbag and my phone. They found a bag of jewellery and asked if it was valuable — it wasn’t. They asked if some cold pills were drugs — they weren’t.

‘They finger-printed me. It was humiliating. I was photographed and body searched. I am not easily intimidated, but it was distressing and traumatic.’

To add insult to injury, when she was finally allowed through passport control, she was landed with a £150 bill from the waiting taxi driver.