Why has legendary QC’s burial been on hold for SIX MONTHS?

Sir Desmond de Silva, QC, one of the first barristers to earn £1 million a year, stylishly negotiated all manner of challenges during his extraordinary life, including an assassination attempt in sierra Leone.

But this was nothing compared to the fate that awaited him in death. For i can disclose that nearly six months after dying in London aged 78 of alleged heart failure, he remains unburied — to the immense distress of his family.

‘it is bizarre and deeply upsetting. i’ve never heard of anything like it,’ says one of his closest relations. ‘What is going on? he needs to be buried. There should be a service for him. A lot of people were very fond of him and would like to pay their respects.’

The cause of the protracted delay is uncertain, though i’m told the circumstances of de silva’s death are giving concern in some quarters.

Back in the summer, his sister, helga — with whom he grew up at

the family home in Sri Lanka, where Gandhi, Nehru and Lord Mountbatten were frequent visitors — told me that she was dismayed to learn the coroner was ‘continuing inquiries’ and that the situation is ‘too, too ghastly’.

The ebullient de Silva married Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia, who was 20 years his junior, in 1987. They had one daughter, Victoria, now 27, before divorcing in 2010, with de Silva declaring the Princess insufficiently intelligent for him.

‘As yet, there is no news from Victoria about a funeral or memorial,’ says one of the family. Victoria’s telephone rang unanswered when I called yesterday.

Rather than wait any longer, Helga has memorialised her brother by erecting a ‘Desmond’ lion sculpture at her home near Kandy, in the heart of Sri Lanka.

In the UK, her children, Selina Blow and brothers Amaury and Detmar — and the latter’s fiancee Martha Fiennes — have had prayers said for de Silva at morning communion in Gloucester Cathedral.

But they yearn to lay the family’s most remarkable member to rest.