The Earl of Cardigan hit with a restraining order by his Voice star daughter
THE Earl of Cardigan’s daughter, singer Bo Bruce, obtained a restraining order against her father, after he threatened to give ‘untrue tasty dirt’ about her to a newspaper. When Miss Bruce was competing on BBC1’s The Voice talent show in 2012, the Earl told her he was co-operating with a tabloid and taunted her by asking whether he should tell reporters about ‘the little scorpion that I have as a daughter’.
At the time, Miss Bruce’s mother, the Earl’s first wife, was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, and she reached ‘the end of her tether’ with her father’s threats. Details of the Earl’s ‘abusive’ and ‘threatening’ behaviour towards his daughter were disclosed in a High Court judgment in the latest round of his lengthy legal battle with the trustees of his ancestral estate, Savernake in Wiltshire.
Miss Bruce, whose full name is Lady Catherine Brudenell-Bruce, and her brother Viscount Savernake, are part-beneficiaries of the estate, but have not supported his court action. She has previously said she never got on with her father and became estranged from him when her parents separated ten years ago.
In 2007, when Miss Bruce, 29, was trying to establish herself as a singer, her father emailed her to say he had been offered £25,000 by a newspaper ‘for a story including material prejudicial to Lady Catherine, her mother and her mother’s sister’, the judge said. The email concluded: ‘Don’t you think I should take the £25,000? I think I should.’
In April 2012, when she was competing in The Voice, Lord Cardigan – David Brudenell-Bruce – emailed his daughter about a proposed article. He said he had to ask himself whether to ‘leave it as it is, with its references to the little scorpion that I have as a daughter’ or to ‘go with his better instincts, and say nothing but nice things’ about her. Later the same day he sent her another email saying he was sure he could ‘invent some untrue tasty dirt’ about her as well.
Miss Bruce eventually got to the final of The Voice, finishing as runner-up. Her mother, Rosamond, Countess of Cardigan, died a month later. Miss Bruce asked the trustees of the Savernake estate to underwrite the legal costs of applying for a restraining order against her father, which they agreed to. The order against Lord Cardigan was granted on July 11, 2012.
Also in the judgment were details of how the Earl fired off emails describing a former friend variously as a ‘pedant…stupid man… scum… creature and thief’. He further suggested ex-local Tory party chairman John Moore, one of two men he has been trying to remove as trustees of his 4,500 acre estate, should ‘ p*** off’, it was claimed. The judge, who heard the estate had lost sums totalling more than £64,000 as a result of certain management failures, ruled Mr Moore should go.
But Mr Justice Newey said the Earl was wrong to describe the barrister’s clerk as a ‘ thief ’ – and warned the 61-year-old aristocrat against using the ruling to ‘blacken Mr Moore’s name’.