Lashings of deliciously wicked gossip
By Frances Hardy Immaculately connected and a friend of the royals, she knows ALL of high society’s secrets. Now she’s spilling the beans in a book packed with...
BASIA BRIGGS is habitually remembered as a socialite, friend of the royals and thrower of some of the capital’s most lavish and celebrity-studded parties.
A confidante of the Duchess of York, staple of Hello! magazine, and indefatigable fundraiser, her address book is a compendium of the wealthy and well-connected.
But these days she’d rather be at home than mingling with the great and good over canapes and champagne.
‘I’m all partied out!’ she cries. ‘The company is everything and if I come across someone really likeable, that’s fine. But on the whole, to get dressed up and go out and make small talk . . . well,’ she grimaces, ‘I’d rather be reading or watching DVDs at home. And balls! How I hate them! These days you sit down and you’re trapped for three hours listening to interminable speeches.
‘The Gettysburg address [President Lincoln’s rousing but famously brief speech during the American Civil War] only lasted two minutes, but people today just drone on and on, and by the time there’s dancing, everyone has lost the will to live.
‘If I’m invited I’ll now happily say: “No, thank you.” ’
We meet at Basia’s Edwardian home at the intersection of three of London’s most exclusive boroughs: Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Chelsea. Could there be a more coveted address?
Her Polish cleaner Eva ushers me in. All is snug and burnished; the fire flickers. And here is Basia, 58, tiny and fine-boned with the flawless skin of a porcelain doll and Goldilocks curls, her dainty legs thrown over the arm of a leather wingback chair.
Basia (pronounced Basher, which makes her sound like a safe-cracker) defies categorisation: sweet- natured and impeccably mannered, she can also be gossipy and fun.
Her upper-crust accent betrays just a hint of her Eastern European heritage, but all of a sudden she’ll throw you with a Cockney idiom. ‘Oh blimey,’ she’ll exclaim, or, ‘What a plonker!’
She and Dick Briggs, a property developer and her second husband of 30 years, own Hyde Park Stables, the equestrian haunt of royals and the beau
monde, currently on the market for £5 million. (Dick would like the buyers to be ‘horsey, with a bit of class’. Basia is inclined to think the place will go to a Russian oligarch.)
I ask about their long association with the Royal Family and she explains that she can’t help but know them: ‘In this part of London it’s raining royals.’
Basia is a good friend of The Duchess of York, who, despite her divorce 21 years ago from Prince Andrew, amicably shares a home — Royal Lodge, Windsor — with the Queen’s second son.
‘Fergie is definitely mistress of the house,’ Basia says. ‘I don’t think it remotely odd that they still live together. The more love there is in the world, the better, and they’re obviously happy. Good for them.’ In a prediction that will surprise many, she adds: ‘I expect them to re-marry — not that it’s my business.’ SHE continues: ‘Fergie is much maligned and far too trusting, but she has a good heart and she’s done a wonderful job of bringing up their daughters — although one of them has a dodgy taste in hats.’
Basia has robust views on the sexual harassment scandals that have been convulsing Hollywood and Westminster. She feels that too many women are failing to deal with the problem properly. Certainly, she knows how she would react.
‘If a man touches my knee, I say, “Don’t do that.” If he persists, you don’t go bleating to the authorities. Stab him in the hand with a sharp pencil. Scratch him. Poke his eye. We should remember that Westminster abounds with women in short skirts, flaunting their bosoms, who take advantage of men.’
Basia’s Polish father fled his homeland for England to escape Hitler’s purges. Her mother was a beauty from a theatrical family in Warsaw; she was also erratic, childish, wildly promiscuous and ultimately a hopeless alcoholic.
Basia cheerfully admits that her husband Dick, who spent the first two years of his life in a Bethnal Green orphanage, was a ‘hoodlum’ when they met.
‘He was impossible. Savage! If someone irritated him he’d say: “Do you want one broken leg or two?” But I was desperate for a protector, and he protected me. He still does. Bit by bit, I changed him, smoothed his rough edges and turned him into a gentleman. But it took a while.’ ON CUE, there’s a heavy footfall on the stairs. It’s Dick. Imposing of girth and impeccably suited, he’s on his way to collect two bespoke shirts from royal warrant-holder Turnbull & Asser.
‘I was drunk, probably,’ he roars of his threats to break legs. ‘But I haven’t had a drink for 30 years now. And I’m a vegan.’
He also has an OBE (he says it stands for Our Basia’s Efforts) plus friends among the Royals — including Princess Michael of Kent with whom, he tells me, he recently had lunch, although Basia shoos him off when I ask him what they talked about.
‘Colourful’ is a word frequently applied to Dick, but his life is no more extraordinary than Basia’s. Now she has written about it in a riveting memoir being serialised in the Mail from Monday. It’s so compelling that I raced through it in one sitting.
It tells how her idyllic early childhood in a rambling Surrey mansion was abruptly curtailed when her late mother — who, she says, had an obsession with the size of men’s private parts — dragged her off to London and took a series of wealthy lovers.
Her mother tried to kill one of them after he became jealous; she left the gas on in the kitchen as he was sleeping, and Basia was complicit in the subsequent cover-up.
Basia, an only child, was packed off, aged six, to a convent boarding school, where she was reviled as a ‘dirty little foreigner’.
Then, when she was a fledgling It-girl in the Chelsea Set, she found herself pregnant after a holiday romance. She endured a botched abortion and fled to Australia to escape the shame.
There, she married the man who had impregnated her. Graham was a priapic, tight-fisted Aussie who fathered her children — Adam and Camilla — and had an affair with Basia’s mother, who had followed her to Australia. Basia was in her 20s; her husband a decade older, and her mother in her 40s.
‘I didn’t believe my mother when she first told me about the affair, but then she said Graham was very well endowed. I knew then she was telling the truth.’
Stung by this final betrayal, Basia returned to London where she met and married Dick.
I ask if she finds it hard to trust anyone after the double act of treachery. She says: ‘I didn’t dwell on it. I took it for granted. I got used to people wanting to do me harm. But if you know nothing else . . .’ her voice trails off.
‘I know my Mother did really bad things but I still loved her. I felt responsible for her, as
she was so childish and daft. And sometimes she was very kind to me.’
It was this generous nature that led Basia to offer sanctuary in her home to Jane Andrews, a former aide to the Duchess of York, while she was on trial in 2001 for the murder of her wealthy boyfriend. Basia believed Andrews’s lies that the death was accidental. In the end, Andrews was convicted.
‘I got her character totally wrong,’ is all she wishes to say about Andrews. As for her Royal links, she claims she is reluctant to talk about these ‘because it looks as if I’m showing off’. But clearly the Queen Mother was a favourite: ‘She was going to the
races in heels at 100, and she never let anyone see her in her glasses.’ Many celebrities have been to her Hyde Park Stables to ride horses. She recalls a ‘pleasant’ afternoon more than 20 years ago with Donald Trump. ‘He was over-effusive — he told me I was “great” and “terrific”. He rode perfectly well — in the British style.’
At the time, the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana was in trouble, and Trump told her: ‘All they’ve got to do is get on.’ She adds: ‘Actually, I think he’s a man of peace.’
Another celebrity who rode her horses was the actor Pierce Brosnan. Her verdict? ‘Born on a horse, and a marvellous horseman.’
Basia is entertaining, convivial company, but she becomes tearful when she talks about the death of her ‘ best friend’, Daniel Topolski, two years ago. She and the former Oxford University oarsman, who coached the Dark Blue crew to ten victories over Cambridge between 1976 and 1985, enjoyed an intense 13-year friendship. ‘He used to call me his “darling one”, his “muse” and “guardian angel”.
However, in January 2015, aged 69, Topolski had leukaemia, his liver was packing up and he was dying.
He had been dropped at the Royal Marsden Hospital in South-West London by his wife for treatment and it had been arranged that Basia would collect him later. She recalls seeing him standing on the hospital steps: ‘He was so frail and tired.
‘We went back to his house and all evening I rubbed his bare feet as he lay on the sofa, to warm them up. I went home at midnight after he hugged me at the door. I never saw him again. He died a few weeks later.
‘I wish I’d stayed the night. If I’d known it was going to be the last time I saw him, I would have. My husband would have understood.’
She says she took Topolski’s death very badly. ‘I’m paralysed with grief, and the only way I keep going is to keep my life structured and occupied; to fill each moment.’ PERHAPS inevitably, Basia’s friendship with the married Topolski was criticised. She and Topolski’s widow, actress Susan Gilmore — who starred in the TV yachting-folk serial Howards’ Way — did not speak to each other at the service at St Martin- in- the- Fields church in Trafalgar Square to celebrate his life.
She says he had requested that she attend, but she left the ceremony promptly afterwards. Looking back, she says: ‘ I’m sorry if his wife felt cross, but if a man and his wife have issues, it’s between them.’
There is something affecting about her sadness; she seems lost and bereft. She looks back on her life — a potent mix of glamour, wealth, heartbreak, betrayal and loss.
‘I’ve always danced with the devil,’ she says. ‘You have to take risks, don’t you? At least when I’m on my deathbed, I’m not going to lie there and think, I’m so glad I was careful.’
MOTHER ANGUISH by Basia Briggs is published by Quartet Books on December 5 at £20. To order a copy for £16 (offer valid to December 14, 2017; p&p free), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.