Why is money bags boss of The Lady on furlough pay?

HE APPALLED his three brothers and his redoubtable mother last year when he sold the splendid London HQ of The Lady, the stateliest and oldest of Britain’s women’s magazines, founded by his greatgrandfather in 1885.

But Ben Budworth, who pocketed £12.4 million from the sale and lives in splendour at Bylaugh Hall in Norfolk, has not lost his talent for antagonising his family.

I can disclose that his brothers Richard, William and Adam, and their mother, Julia, have just learned that Budworth has taken advantage of emergency coronavirus legislation to put himself on furlough, trousering nearly £2,500-a-month of taxpayers’ money in the process.

‘ I haven’t heard from him for months,’ 88-year-old Julia, a cousin of the spirited Mitford sisters, tells me. ‘He won’t answer letters, he won’t answer telephone calls — he’s a nightmare, frankly, a nightmare to the whole family.

‘ I don’t know what has happened to him. It’s very sad. He was a jolly boy. Somehow he changed. We’re horrified, horrified, horrified. There’s no other word — and that’s not strong enough — for the way he’s behaved. The boys — his brothers — are absolutely shattered.’ Budworth, 56, who succeeded his uncle Tom — Julia’s brother — at the helm of The Lady in 2008, is unabashed. ‘I furloughed myself,’ he tells me from Bylaugh Hall where he keeps his private helicopter. ‘We’ve got four — five — staff on furlough at the moment. I am [one of them]. I can still undertake directorial and statutory duties.’ This is particularly convenient, as he recently married his long-term girlfriend, Helen Robinson, pictured with Budworth. ‘As my wife is the [magazine’s] managing director, we work as a team. She does her bit and I do mine.’ And Budworth is eager to scotch suggestions that The Lady is on the point of being put into voluntary liquidation. These have been prompted by documents filed at Companies House which record the voting rights of each class of share in the business — and in any ‘distribution [of funds] arising from a winding-up of the company’. ‘ There is absolutely nothing that is not routine in any of that,’ Budworth assures me, insisting that the suggestions are ‘ b****** s with a capital “B” ’.