Who will inherit reclusive Viscount’s £65 million fortune?

HE LIVED frugally, favouring secondhand cars, flying economy and keeping his country house in a condition unaltered since the 1950s. But Shane Gough, 5th and last Viscount Gough, did not do so because he’d been reduced to penury.

I can reveal that the peer, a lifelong bachelor, left a fortune of more than £65 million when he died last April aged 81.

But quite who — if anyone yone — will inherit this mouthwatering sum is open to question, following the he publication this week of ‘ a Grant of Letters of Administration’.

It’s ‘a legal document issued by the Probate Registry when a person has died without making a valid will’.

Solicitors for the late te viscount, an only child, ild, decline to comment.

But a financial whizz says all manner of secrets and surprises can emerge while executors unravel a client’s affairs.

‘If he had assets in other places, you have to get probate in more than one jurisdiction,’ she tells me. In the case of Lord Gough, this seems likely to include diligent work in Australia where he’d acquired a significant property portfolio.

Sometimes, she adds, the surprises can be very lively indeed. ‘That’s when there are illegitimate children, for whom trusts were set up which the main family knew nothing about.’ After leaving Winchester, Gough became an Irish Guards officer. ‘ He was stationed over here for a very short spell,’ says his kinsman, Johnny Gough, 99, who lives in Northern Ireland. ‘He called in, so I met him then. But he was rather reclusive.’

Although listed as a member of White’s, Pratt’s and the MCC, Viscount Gough was seldom seen.

Nor, it seems, was he active with the Royal Company of Archers — the Queen’s Bodyguard for Scotland — even though he continued to list it in Who’s Who.

business activities — and freemasonry — were more rewarding. He was three times Worshipful Master of the Lodge of Assistance, while, in the City, he was a stockbroker before establishing a venture capital company. Although he never frittered money on himself, either at his London house in South Kensington, which he bought for £595,000 in 1998,

his Scottish estate, Keppoch, near Inverness, he was generous to causes close to his heart.

If no valid will emerges, the law gives a detailed order of precedence — decreeing that half-cousins are the most distant relations who can inherit. If all else fails, everything goes to the Treasury . . .

Johnny Gough believes that his kinsman will have ensured that some delightful surprises will emerge — eventually. ‘ I’m sure it will all work out,’ he tells me. ‘ I’m certainly not expecting anything.’