£5bn Schroders heiress finds love with Eton top shot

SHE is arguably the most eligible woman in Britain — a beguiling blonde with estates in England and Scotland, plus the lioness’s share of her family’s £5 billion fortune.

But Leonie Schroder (below) has endured a lot of trauma, never more so than when her ex- husband, Nicholas Fane, tragically died shortly after their divorce eight years ago.

So I’m delighted to reveal that the heiress — daughter of the late billionaire banker Bruno Schroder — is celebrating her engagement to Guy Blakeney. He is a member of the Royal Company of Archers, the monarch’s bodyguard in Scotland, which turns out for ceremonial occasions.

‘He has made her really happy — for the first time in a long time,’ a friend tells me. Management consultant Blakeney, 48, is an Old Etonian — as was Fane, with whom Leonie had three children — and a crack shot, representing the Etonian Shooting Club.

Leonie’s own talents were, rather cruelly, called into question when, in 2018, the Daily Mail Diary disclosed that her father was plotting to place her on the board of Schroders, which today has a staggering £732 billion under management.

The prospect appalled City bigwigs, with one asserting that Leonie was ‘completely unqualified’ as she had ‘no experience in financial services’. Leonie, now 48, had held various directorships since graduating from St Andrews University, but only in small organisations such as her father’s 18,500-acre Dunlossit estate on the Scottish island of Islay, or her own 1,200-acre Hurstbourne Park estate in Hampshire.

But shareholder anger was quelled and she was appointed to the board after Bruno died, aged 86, in 2019. Several years earlier, Bruno, who was estranged from Leonie’s mother, Piffa, had married his mistress, Baroness Suzanne Maltzahn. Before that, he had been embroiled in a protracted legal battle with a previous mistress, Elaine Decoulos. Friends look forward to the wedding. ‘Guy is tall and lanky,’ says one, ‘[ but] she’s a shortie. It’ll be fun watching them on the dance floor’.