The Vicar of Baghdad pays tribute to colleague Kingston
A PRIEST dubbed the vicar of Baghdad last night paid tribute to the late financier and hostage negotiator Tom Kingston.
Mr Kingston, 45, the husband of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent’s daughter Lady Gabriella Windsor, died on Sunday at a property in Gloucestershire.
Paramedics were called at 6pm and police also attended. An inquest will be held to establish cause of death but there are no suspicious circumstances and no other parties involved.
Reverend Canon Andrew White, who ran Iraq’s only Anglican church and worked with Mr Kingston in Baghdad, said the ‘adrenaline junkie’ pair cheated death countless times.
Mr Kingston worked in the war- torn country for nearly three years, mediating conflicts and negotiating the release of hostages.
Paying tribute to his ‘best ever intern’, rev White told the Mail: ‘I worked with Tom in all sorts of dangerous places. Most of the time we were there in the middle of war zones.’
rev White described Mr Kingston as ‘a risk-taker and a person of great faith’.
‘Tom wasn’t a yellow-belly. He was never scared. I could never say to him “do this” and he’d say it was too dangerous. He was always willing to be there.’
Mr Kingston’s work with the priest, who has multiple sclerosis, helped maintain the Anglican church in Baghdad, which was founded in 1990.
Mr Kingston, who studied economic history at Bristol University, had several brushes with death, most notably during a suicide bombing at the church in 2004, which claimed 22 lives.
Rev White recalled another occasion when the pair visited a shrine to the prophet ezekiel in Babylon and got caught in a huge traffic jam on the way back.
He said: ‘We couldn’t move, and I can remember saying “What do we do Tom?” And he said, “Pray”. I said, “Lord, have mercy on us” and suddenly a huge oil tanker about 25 metres ahead of us blew up.
‘If we hadn’t been in the traffic jam, we would have been killed instantly. But this was a kind of daily thing that happened.’
Before Mr Kingston met Lady Gabriella, rev White remembers telling him: ‘All of my interns, they achieve two things. They do really exciting work when they leave here, and they marry really beautiful women. And you will do both... and he did both.’
The priest said he met Lady Gabriella, 42, who is 57th in line to the throne, at the Carlton Club in London’s Mayfair after Mr Kingston had proposed in 2018.
He said: ‘She was such a darling. I loved her. I remember sitting down and she said, “Well, who am I really marrying?”
‘I said, “You’re marrying more than a rock star. You’re marrying one of the great people who never took no for an answer and always took risks”. I said, “I hope you’re very bold, because you need to be”.
‘She said, “I’m very bold and I’m very much in love, so don’t worry”.’
In a statement issued by Buckingham Palace, Lady Gabriella and Mr Kingston’s relatives described him as ‘exceptional’ and someone who ‘lit up the lives of all that knew him’.
‘He was never scared’