‘Cash for honours’ fixer forced to quit Duke of Kent’s club
HE’S the society fixer at the heart of the troubling episode which saw Prince Charles’s right-hand man, Michael Fawcett, resign as chief executive of The Prince’s Foundation, whose affairs have become the subject of a Metropolitan Police ‘cash for honours’ investigation.
Now, in a sign that the ground may be crumbling beneath him, I can disclose that Michael Wynne-Parker, who had repeated dealings with Fawcett, has resigned from the Cavalry & Guards Club, of which he had been a member for many years. Indeed, I understand that he did so in circumstances which left him little option other than to ‘do the decent thing’ and go.
Rarely lost for words, Wynne-Parker, 76, is uncharacteristically taciturn when I call him. ‘I just resigned, and that’s it,’ he tells me.
But, it seems, there is rather more to it than that, as Wynne-Parker acknowledges when I suggest that he was, in fact, asked to resign by the club’s hierarchy. ‘You could put it like that,’ he agrees. ‘It was the former Secretary, David Cowdery, who did it.’
Neither Cowdery, who retired this month, nor his successor, nor indeed anyone else at the club, cares to comment on Wynne-Parker’s departure.
But I’m told that the Cavalry & Guards, which has intimate ties with the Duke of Kent, its president, and the Duchess of Cornwall, its Lady Patron, has not enjoyed the blizzard of headlines about Wynne-Parker and his pivotal role in the ‘cash for honours’ affair which threatens to imperil the Prince of Wales’s reputation.
With Fawcett and William Bortrick, owner of society stud book Burke’s Peerage, Wynne-Parker discussed how best to secure an honour for Saudi tycoon Mahfouz bin Mahfouz.
Those discussions led to Mahfouz, who had already received a CBE — conferred on him by the heir to the throne for ‘services to charities in the UK’ — donating more than £1.5 million to The Prince’s Foundation. No knighthood was forthcoming and Charles has made it plain that he was entirely unaware of Fawcett’s suggestion that it might be.
The club’s more orthodox members are unlikely to miss Wynne-Parker, a robust figure of insistent charm who was a friend of the late, thricemarried 6th Marquess of Bristol — jailed for theft and burglary — and who has also been a long-standing business ally of Prince Michael of Kent.
But others regret his departure. ‘I saw him a while ago with a stunning young woman in a fabulously short skirt,’ one tells me. ‘Must have been one of his goddaughters.’