The smart set’s talking about... Posh publican Nats
FORGET memories of Bet Lynch behind the bar at the Rovers Return, pubs are now becoming status symbols for the upper classes.
And the latest to open a boozer is royal pal Natalie Hicks-Loebbecke.
Army major’s daughter Nats, who was talked about as a potential bride for Prince William after she was pictured on his arm at a charity polo match, has taken over The Milbank Arms in the Yorkshire Dales and overseen extensive renovations.
It sits on the 6,500-acre Barningham Moor family estate of her baronet husband, Sir Edward Milbank.
‘We were terrified about taking on a pub project because there are so many shutting all over the place,’ Natalie, now Lady Milbank, tells me. ‘The people advising us were telling us not to do it and that we were mad.’
Nats, who worked as a security consultant in Iraq, says of the pub: ‘It’s added a bit of extra sparkle to this dale.’
She won’t, however, be pulling pints herself: ‘I would be banned because it would spill and go everywhere. I don’t see myself as a landlady, but I go to it every day because it’s at the bottom of our drive.’
OH, TO be a fly on the wall when Boris Johnson comes face to face with the Queen next week. I hear the Prime Minister is due to be summoned to Buckingham Palace for his first meeting with Her Majesty since he sent Jacob Rees-Mogg to Balmoral to seek permission for Parliament to be prorogued. Boris made a grovelling telephone call to the Queen after the Supreme Court ruled that the suspension unlawful. ‘The Prime Minister will have an audience with the Queen soon after she comes back from Scotland,’ a courtier tells me. My advice to Boris: tin hat on.
SHAME-FACED Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, who was thrown out of his party’s conference in Manchester this week over a clash with security staff, has found an elegant figure to provide consolation.
I can disclose that he has become engaged to Kym Erlich, a fun-loving actress-turned-estate agent many years his junior. ‘They are very loved-up,’ one of their friends tells me.
The divorced Cotswolds MP, 66, is said to be living with Kym, whose exes include former MP and spy writer Rupert Allason, banking scion Alex Hoare and journalist William Cash, at his pile near Cirencester and his swish pad in Central London.
Iraq War veteran Sir Desmond Swayne managed to come home from the Tory conference with a nasty gash above his left eye. Swayne, who was David Cameron’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, told friends he was injured while fending off a mugger — adding that his attacker came off distinctly worse. Now, however, he tells a different story. ‘I said that in jest,’ he insists. ‘There was no violence involved whatsoever; there was no attack.’ adding to the intrigue, he tells me: ‘I cannot remember how it happened. I do have a habit of hitting my head a lot on things, like car boots.’ Talk about headbangers.