The golden girl who became the Queen’s favourite
Lady Gabriella Windsor – the brains of the Royal family – marries today, writes Anna Tyzack
The third royal bride in a year will climb the steps of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle today, as Lady Gabriella Windsor marries Tom Kingston. The couple and their guests will then head to a reception at Frogmore House, just as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did this time last year.
Frogmore’s staff may be a well-oiled machine when it comes to vintage champagne and canapés, but today’s wedding will certainly be smaller and more private than the Sussex celebfest.
As 52nd in line to the throne (Master Archie has shunted her down further), 38-year-old Lady Gabriella – Ella to her friends – doesn’t qualify for carriage processions or a BBC film crew.
The public – assuming they even know who she is – will be lucky to get a glimpse as she enters the chapel with her father, Prince Michael of Kent, and emerges with her new husband, a middle-class financier.
Still, Lady Gabriella is not too ordinary to have the Queen’s party planner organising her reception or for the Queen, her first cousin once removed, to watch her make her vows.
In 2009, the Queen declined to attend the marriage of Lady Gabriella’s brother, Lord Frederick Windsor, to actress Sophie Winkleman, implying that, in royal circles, Lady Gabriella is quite the golden girl. She has some claim to be the brains of the Royal family, too: unlike her Wales cousins, she achieved top A-level results and multiple degrees – a BA in comparative literature from Ivy League Brown and a social science master of philosophy from Oxford. She has written for Country Life and Monocle – as well as this newspaper – while, for the most part, keeping out of the tabloids.
Perhaps, though, it is her pithy sense of humour that earned her position as the Queen’s favourite. She once wrote in The Spectator that “American food is
overrated, unhealthy and revolting, and the sooner they wean themselves off it, the better they’ll feel”.
Such outspokenness is perhaps to be expected, given that Lady Gabriella’s mother is Princess Michael of Kent, also known as “Princess Pushy”, due to her commanding presence and forthright opinions. Certainly, there was no way Lady Gabriella was going to spend her childhood sloping around in Kensington Palace or the Kents’ country pile in Gloucestershire. Aged 13, she was packed off to Downe House, a highly selective girls’ school in Berkshire to realise her “true potential”.
But not even Downe could mould her into a goody two-shoes: Lady
‘She was naughty – wild, even. But she was also extremely bright’
Gabriella was caught smoking and eventually suspended for smuggling in cigarettes. “She was naughty – wild, even,” says an acquaintance. “But she was also extremely bright.”
Straight-a grades earned her a place at Brown, where she could broaden her horizons (slash, expand her social network) – and fall in love. In 2003, she met Aatish Taseer, the Britishborn son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and assassinated Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer.
For three years, the pair led a fast life of parties and galas, but, in 2006, Taseer asked her to move to India, she declined and they parted ways.
The split heralded the end of Lady Gabriella’s wild days and she settled into full-time work at Branding Latin America, a marketing consultancy in Knightsbridge, where she is now a senior director. Unlike her father, a working royal, she will never perform official duties, but she is a director for the Playing for Change Foundation, which supports global music and arts education, and Toucan Ventures, promoting creative entrepreneurs.
It seems churlish that, more than a decade after their split, Mr Taseer would attempt to shatter Lady Gabriella’s image, but in a vitriolic piece in Vanity Fair last year, he wrote: “There were schlosses, boats and stag shoots.” Taseer – now married to a man – suggested that he and Lady Gabriella skinny-dipped in the pool at Buckingham Palace and took drugs – allegations that have been dismissed as “fiction”.
Happily, Mr Taseer’s article did nothing to dampen the affections of Tom Kingston, Lady Gabriella’s affable boyfriend, whom she met in 2015. Mr Kingston proposed a few months later, while spending Christmas at his parents’ holiday cottage on Sark; Princess Michael was said to be delighted, complaining only that Mr Kingston was “a little short”.
If his upbringing was rather less silver-spoon than Lady Gabriella’s, Mr Kingston is comfortable as an old slipper in society circles – his stag do was at posh private members’ club White’s. His father, Martin Kingston QC, is a planning barrister and member of the Church of England general synod; his mother, Jill, is a trustee of a Christian healing centre.
At Bristol University he was known as “Christian Tom” and later served in the Foreign Office at the Iraqi Institute of Peace, to mediate conflicts and negotiate the release of hostages. Here, he became friends with Canon Andrew White who described him as “an exceptional young man” able to “see beyond the impossible”.
Once married, the couple will continue to live their low-key, high-society existence. First though, they have a wedding breakfast at Frogmore House, followed by a smaller party for close friends in London this evening.
And while it might not be the grandest royal wedding of recent years, with Princess Michael of Kent at the helm, it may yet go off with the biggest bang.