My bitter falling out with the Queen of poison
Royal writer MICHAEL THORNTON counted I’m A Celeb’s Lady Colin Campbell as a friend. Not any more!
EARLIER this year, I was asked to appear in a prime-time TV documentary. I’ve never been known to be shy, but I turned down the offer, and thereby hangs a tale.
In the New Year, BBC2 will screen this important programme. Called Royal Wives At War, it dramatises the Queen Mother’s bitter antipathy towards her hated sister-in-law, the Duchess of Windsor.
As the author of the first book on this subject, Royal Feud, I was invited by producers Tim Dunn and Kate Shiers not only to be the consultant for the programme, but also to appear in it alongside John Julius Norwich, Hugo Vickers, Anne Sebba, Andrew Morton and several other highly reputable historians and biographers.
I was on the point of accepting when I learned Lady Colin Campbell would also be appearing — yes, the now notorious Lady C, whose preposterous behaviour and foul-mouthed tirades on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, appalled and electrified the nation in equal measure, making her the most controversial reality TV performer of the year. Instead, I politely withdrew from the project. My decision had nothing to do with Lady Colin’s repugnant outbursts on I’m A Celebrity, which had not even taken place at that point. But Lady C and I have history.
We had once been friends — though the friendship, like other relationships in her strange and embattled life, had ended badly. And I knew it could prove potentially explosive for everyone concerned if she and I were to be in the same room together.
Our association began in 1974, the year of her disastrous and pitifully brief marriage to Lord Colin Campbell, the younger son of the 11th Duke of Argyll.
Her husband, a man she has subsequently pilloried as a drug addict, an alcoholic, a wifebeater, a child abuser, a dealer in death threats and a disaster in bed with a ‘lipstick sized’ penis, proposed the night they met.
He married her in a drunken haze just five days later, after first forcing her to sign a pre-nup agreement saying that she would not demand alimony if they divorced. He then went on a pub crawl. The marriage lasted just 14 months, and for the subsequent 40 years they have traded horrendous insults and accusations against each other. He has always sworn she never told him before the marriage that she had been registered at birth and raised as a boy, and only achieved recognition as a female after surgery at the age of 21 to correct a genital malformation.
She is equally adamant she did tell him, and accuses him of selling to the Sunday People a story that began: ‘Lord Colin Campbell last night revealed that his wife . . . was once a man.’
At the outset, I was sympathetic to Lady Colin. I met her through my friend Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who was Colin Campbell’s stepmother.
I was at Margaret’s house in London one day when Colin came to see her soon after he’d married Lady C. He was so drunk the housekeeper tried to stop him coming in, and he upset all the poodles’ dog bowls as he stumbled.
Colin’s drunkenness merely encouraged my feelings of sympathy towards Lady C. As did the fact that her brother-in-law, the 12th Duke of Argyll, was so contemptuous of her, and of Lord Colin for marrying her.
I remember sitting in the drawingroom at Inveraray Castle, the family stronghold in the Western Scottish Highlands, listening to the Duke sending up his unwanted sister-inlaw’s sing-song Jamaican accent with an outrageous display of mimicry.
‘Hellooooo dar, Ian!’ intoned the Duke, impersonating a telephone call he had received from her after her marriage to his brother.
When the marriage ended acrimoniously with a quickie-style divorce in the Dominican Republic on the grounds of incompatibility, Lady Colin placed a notice in The Times that read: ‘ Lady Colin Campbell wishes in future to be known by her maiden name, Miss Georgia Ziadie.’
She has since insisted this proved impossible because newspapers and publishers refused to accept her abandoning the title, but it is nonsense. Nothing is simpler than to forgo a title if the person concerned really wishes to do so. The politicians Tony Benn and Sir Alec Douglas-Home managed it quite easily.
The truth is that it was a decision she thought better of very rapidly.
Lady Colin was not blind to the social and commercial possibilities of retaining the title, even an utterly discredited title so briefly held.
And sure enough, she began to exploit it to the full, using it to claim a relationship with the royal families of Britain and Europe, and publishing books such as Lady Colin Campbell’s
She was not blind to the benefits of retaining her title
Guide To Being A Modern Lady, with a ducal coronet on the front. Such books would not have had the same sales potential had she used the name Miss Georgia Ziadie. In London’s smart set, she was cruelly known as ‘Boy George’.
Her father, a self-made man, ran a shop in Kingston, Jamaica. Evidently sensitive to suggestions that she came from ‘trade’ and ‘new money’, she has constructed ever more grandiose accounts of her alleged ancestry.
‘My father was a descendant of Charlemagne and William the Conqueror,’ she is fond of saying.
‘I am a countess in my own right,’ she assures interviewers. ‘My father was a Russian count. His family helped the Tsar during the Crimean War and were made Russian counts.’
This is news to people who knew her family in Jamaica.
Her father, hardly an aristocratic figure, made no such claims. On Lady C’s 1949 birth certificate — where she is named George William Ziadie — in the column showing rank or profession of father, there appears one word: ‘Merchant’.
And yet there was always much to admire about the spirited Georgie. In 1993, unable to have children of her own, she adopted two Russian orphans, Misha and Dima, and I have never heard anything to suggest — even from her enemies — that she has been anything other than a loving and caring mother.
In the early Nineties, when her adored elder brother, the solicitor Michael Ziadie, died at the age of 46 from non-Hodgkin lymphoma — an illness from which I was to suffer myself — she was grief-stricken, but responded to his loss with stoicism and courage.
Yet increasingly, questions were being raised about her behaviour — and her credibility.
When Margaret, Duchess of Argyll — whom Lady C still refers to as her mother-in-law, which she was not — died in 1993, Lady Colin turned up at her funeral fulminating to the assembled media about ‘my lousy stinking father-in-law’ the late Duke of Argyll.
But she was talking about a man who never knew her and whom she had never known.
There were acrimonious disputes with anyone who dared to disagree with her, including a violent confrontation at a 1999 party in London with her former friend, socialite Basia Briggs, which led to the police being called.
As the years passed, changes became manifest in her character and she started to let her ferocious temper get the better of her.
When the world’s richest widow, Brazilian heiress Lily Safra, forced
Diana dropped her because she was a wild card
Lady Colin’s novel, Empress Bianca, to be pulped on the grounds it was a thinly disguised account of Safra’s own life, Lady C was incandescent with fury. (The main character in the book, Bianca Barrett, was a monstrous social climber who would stop at nothing to achieve the status she desired, even murdering two of her four husbands.)
Lady Colin sent me a copy of a letter she had written to Safra’s solicitor, Anthony Julius, who had earlier acted for Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce from Prince Charles. It was a deeply disturbing document — a long, hysterical, vitriolic and threatening tirade that must have amazed the calm and impassive Mr Julius.
Anyone reading it would have been deeply concerned about the state of mind of the person who wrote it. Anthony Julius took absolutely no notice of it, proceeded with his action against her and Lady Colin lost the case.
Typically, and this must be accounted one of her virtues, she refused to accept defeat, rewrote the book with significant amendments and formed a ‘ boutique’ publishing company to publish it herself. As I dislike censorship, I supported Lady Colin in this action, and in others, providing her with witness statements to be used in court.
As we shall see, I was to be repaid extremely ill for my support at that time.
For years, Lady Colin has claimed to have lifted the lid on the truth about Princess Diana’s marriage. But her 1992 book, Diana In Private — which claimed Diana had an affair with a former bodyguard, Sgt Barry Mannakee — was massively overshadowed by that of royal writer Andrew Morton, which came out the same year and went on to sell seven million copies in 80 countries, earning him £5 million.
And we have the word of one of Diana’s best-informed biographers, Tina Brown, that the Princess ‘dropped’ Georgie and withdrew cooperation from her ‘when she realised she was too much of a wild card’.
Lady Colin’s credentials as an historian were not improved in 2012 when her company, Dynasty Press Ltd, published her preposterous work, The Untold Life Of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
This alleged that the Queen Mother was not the daughter of the Countess of Strathmore, but of the family’s French cook, Marguerite Rodiere. And the evidence for this?
None whatsoever beyond the
coincidence that Elizabeth’s third Christian name was Marguerite. Lady Colin further alleged the Earl of Strathmore — like his wife, a deeply religious person — admitted the ‘truth’ about the cook on his deathbed in 1944 to the family physician, Dr Ayles. Evidence again? Nil. It was Lady Colin’s contention that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who always referred to the Queen Mother as ‘Cookie’, did so because they knew that her real mother was a cook.
But this is fantasy. Wallis Simpson’s close friend, the American hostess Kitty Miller, whom I knew well, always said they called her that because they considered that she resembled somebody’s ‘ fat Scottish cook’.
It was her appearance to which they were referring, not her ancestry.
Approached by the media as two men who had written biographies of the Queen Mother, Hugo Vickers and I both said we disbelieved Lady Colin’s allegations completely.
She responded by denouncing us as ‘royal suck-up merchants’, failing to add she quotes our biographies in her own book.
She followed up her denunciations with personal insults, describing Hugo as a man with ‘middle-class aspirations’ (she should talk!) and myself as ‘an effete ignoramus’.
This was a slur that came ill from the mouth of a woman with her history and who shares her life with a 62-year- old gay Irish bachelor, Peter Coleman, whom she calls her ‘gusband’ (or gay husband). And if I am an ‘ignoramus’, then why did she use me as a witness in several of her numerous legal actions?
Last year, Lady Colin made yet another egregious blunder. She accepted a substantial sum from a national newspaper to announce the so-called ‘Headless Man’ — who appeared naked with Margaret Duchess of Argyll in pornographic Polaroid snaps that featured in her sensational 1963 divorce case — was the American airline executive, and
Having five tiaras
doesn’t make you an aristocrat
the Duchess’s subsequent lover, William Hart Lyons.
When she made the claim, I put out a public statement rebutting it — for it could not have been him.
On both their admissions, the Duchess met Lyons for the first time at a dinner party in Lisbon on August 24, 1961.
The ‘Headless Man’ pictures, as proved by the serial number on the Polaroid film, were taken in 1956, discovered by the Duke of Argyll in April 1959 and entered into evidence in his divorce action that year. How could a man the Duchess did not even meet for more than two years after that possibly be the figure appearing with her in these photographs?
Confronted by the newspaper with the utter impossibility of her claims, Lady Colin, in her usual manner, remained unrepentant.
Did she return the newspaper’s fee for the bogus information she had sold them? No. Did she apologise for her wholly unwarranted slur on the reputation of Bill Lyons, a dead man no longer able to defend himself? Not with a single word.
My rebuttal of her Argyll claim caused Lady Colin increased fury and she announced I was ‘a rather nasty pain in the backside’. But that’s what happens when people sell fabricated history based on guesswork, rather than truth.
After her repugnant display of pretended superiority in I’m A Celebrity, Lady Colin announced: ‘I was the grandest person in the camp.’
Really? I saw nothing very grand about her behaviour. A lady is someone who is sure of her position. She does not boast — as Lady Colin did in the jungle — of owning five tiaras, for what does that prove?
It will never confer the true qualities of aristocracy on someone who does not possess them by nature. In the forthcoming BBC2 programme, Lady Colin is to be seen dripping with jewellery and is heard describing the Queen Mother as ‘vindictive and vicious’. More posturing. More poison.
I am not a person who ever rejoices over the loss of a friend, no matter how they may behave.
And if the melancholy truth is that Lady Colin Campbell seems to have become a figure of overweening arrogance, contemptuous of any opinion that is not in accordance with her own, and who does not hesitate to vilify anyone who dares to disagree with her, I still have memories of the Georgie I knew originally, a brave, funny, spirited and likeable woman.
I am quite sure Lady Colin harbours no comparable regret over losing me as a friend.
A clue to her increasingly aggressive attitude to life can be found in the unpleasantly sinister threat she let slip in one of her most recent interviews.
‘I always give much better than I get,’ she crowed. ‘And I pity the man — or woman — who is foolhardly enough to try to cross me because they will live to regret it.’
And this is the person who seriously expects the television viewing public to believe she was ‘ bullied’ by her fellow contestants in I’m A Celebrity. It would be easier to bully a boa constrictor.