Why the Queen will never again see close friend
THE Earl of Carnarvon — whose family seat, Highclere Castle, is where Downton Abbey was filmed — is caught up in a real-life family drama.
His mother, Jean — whose husband Porchy had a close relationship with the Queen — is seriously ill after suffering a heart attack.
However, she cannot return to Highclere, in Hampshire, from her native America because her medical insurance prohibits her from flying.
‘ She’s not allowed to travel because her heart’s not great,’ her second son Harry Herbert, a racing manager, tells me. ‘You can’t insure her.’ Sadly, it means Jean is never likely to be reunited with her close friend the Queen, who no longer undertakes long-haul travel.
It was with Jean, in Highclere’s relatively modest dower house, that the Queen spent the weekend before her 90th birthday celebrations.
Jean also accompanied her to the Chelsea Flower Show and Windsor Horse Show in 2016.
Harry must travel to Wyoming to see his mother and is taking his new girlfriend, Irish chef Clodagh McKenna. Speaking at a party in Piccadilly, he says: ‘It’s awful. She went from fit as a fiddle — the most beautiful woman you have ever seen — three years ago, to a wreck.’
Born Jean Wallop, the Dowager Countess is now 83. Her husband, Porchy, became close to the Queen when he was her racing manager.
His sudden death aged 77 in 2001 was a shattering blow to the monarch. It came on the same day as the September 11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre and many saw a personal touch in the emotional message she sent to be read at a service of remembrance.
‘Nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and the pain of these moments,’ she wrote. ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’