A slur with cruel echoes

MISS Greer’s description of Meghan Markle as a ‘bolter’ is a particularly cruel label.

It was the spiteful name given to Harry’s maternal grandmother, Frances, after she left her first husband, Earl Spencer, for married wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd in 1967.

Until the 1970s, divorce was difficult for a woman to obtain and those who did seek to leave a marriage could expect to have every possible insult thrown at them to blacken their name. Many were likened to an unruly horse bolting from its stall.

After a bitter divorce battle in which Frances’s own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence against her, she was branded a ‘bolter’ and lost custody of her four children, who included Diana – Harry’s mother.

In 2008 Frances Osborne, wife of exchancellor George, wrote a biography, The Bolter, about her greatgrandmother Lady Idina Sackville, who left each of her five husbands.