Is ANY woman brave enough to wed the bawdy baronet?
He’s worth £20m, owns TWO stately homes and wants a wife to give him an heir. But as JANE FRYER found in a riotously un-PC encounter, there is a catch or two . . .
SIR Benjamin Julian Alfred Slade is a rheumy-eyed Casanova who has a most disconcerting habit of pointing to his crotch and talking about ‘business down there’. He describes his ideal woman as ‘a big strong healthy warrior, the bigger the better — if I see a tall woman coming into a room, I just fall over backwards. My tongue hangs out. It gets exciting.’
Last week he caused a furore when he denounced one of his recent (extremely attractive) companions, Bridget Convey, 50, as ‘too old to have children’ and reminded all young, fertile ladies that he is once again ‘interviewing hard’ for the position of Lady Slade.
‘I have had a few proposals,’ he said. ‘ But sometimes the women are past their sell-by date and have been over the guns a few times.’
Sir Ben, as he likes to be addressed, is 70 years old himself.
Subsequently, he announced that he wanted to ‘road-test’ young women, adding: ‘It would be nice if they were a breeder, of an age where they can have a couple of sons.’
On paper — away from the leery, pink-cheeked flesh — Sir Ben’s pedigree is impeccable.
His ancestors fought in the Crimean War; he had links to Horatio Nelson; General Sir John Slade, who bought the family seat, Maunsel House, in 1772, danced with Marie Antoinette; and his aunt Madeleine Slade, as he indelicately puts it, ‘s*****d [Mahatma] Gandhi’.
He is worth about £20 million and owns two Somerset stately homes, 13th-century Maunsel House and 19th-century Woodlands Castle, from which he runs a thriving wedding business. He also has thousands of acres, a handful of farms, a grouse shoot in Scotland, a collection of motheaten stuffed animal heads, hundreds of guns and wardrobes of red trousers.
Which presumably is why he is so desperate for an heir (plus a spare) to inherit it all when he dies.
‘Daughters don’t count,’ he says. ‘Wonderful things to have around, of course, but they don’t count.’
Over the years he has been relentless in his quest, rattling through a wife, Pauline Myburgh; several long- term lovers including Fiona Aitken, now wife of the Earl of Carnarvon and chatelaine of Highclere Castle, where Downton was filmed (‘absolutely impossible woman; social astronaut, drove me mad!’); actress Kirsten Hughes and, by his own account, more members of European ‘jet-trash’ society than most gentry have had roast grouse dinners.
But
he can’t seem to get it right. ‘ I’m the worst judge of women in England. I’ve had five mad women on the trot; it’s been very difficult.’
In 2007 he made a public appeal for an heir of sorts, offering his entire estate to whichever stranger most closely matched his DNA, so long as they weren’t Guardian readers, drug-users or communists.
that didn’t work because the winner, Isaac Slade, who fronts u.S. rock group the Fray, was too busy with his band to deal with sweeping driveways and the worry of dry rot.
then in 2012, after Kirsten, then 49, had, according to him, ‘run off with the handyman’, Sir Ben wasted no time in advertising to replace not only the handyman but Kirsten, too, offering a £50,000 salary plus car, house, food and holidays.
Crucially, the successful candidate would have a shotgun certificate, be able to run two castles and must be able to breed two sons (it didn’t matter if she had bred before).
And when that didn’t bear fruit, he had his sperm frozen (‘ it’s very good stuff ’) and carried on chatting up ‘any bit of crumpet that moves’ — so long as she didn’t come from a country with green in its flag, beginning with an ‘I’, or anywhere they don’t wear overcoats in the winter.
But still there was no heir apparent riding a trike through the great hall.
So is he really an appalling man, playing for laughs or publicity, or has desperation made him so ungallant?
Whatever the truth, his recent comments have not gone down well. Bridget, unsurprisingly, was hopping mad, not least because they haven’t been an item since 2014 and she is actually happily engaged to a chap called Alister. Online, thousands have denounced Sir Ben as a sexist dinosaur.
‘I’m not sexist,’ he says. ‘Men want to carve a joint and pour the drinks, women want to make sure the table looks nice. It’s a partnership!’
But a fair few, perhaps tempted by his surprisingly good skin as much as his fortune, got in touch this week.
‘ I’ve been inundated with offers!’ he chirps happily, oblivious to the feminist blood boiling around him. ‘I’m going to have a party and get them all down. the more the merrier!’
Hugely encouraged, he has even added new criteria to his list of required attributes.
Driving and shooting licences are now non-negotiable. the former is to drive him to long boozy lunches, while the latter is more pressing since police found an unlicensed shotgun in his bedroom — he liked to shoot foxes in his pyjamas — and he nearly landed in prison.
Scorpios are also a no-no. And now he is slowing down a bit, so is anyone much under 30 ‘or over 40’.
A ‘ terribly exotic Spanish creature’ he dated 18 months ago was duly informed of this necessity: ‘ She said: “Darling, you’re too old for me.” And I said: “No darling, you’ll be 40 next year — you’re too old for me!”’
Sir Ben, who made his fortune in shipping but then put most of the money into his estate, is now asset-rich but cash-poor, so life with him will not be all butlers, polished silverware and devilled kidneys.
He re-uses teabags and lives on vegetable juice, Ryvita, watery porridge and the occasional gull’s egg as a treat.
TO save £15,000 tax a year, he has moved out of Maunsel House into a half-built farmhouse where he scrimps on the heating, shares a bedroom with his Jack Russell, Bully, and labrador, Gerald, named after the late Duke of Westminster, and has an inspirational message from Donald trump by his bed (he and trump’s first wife, Ivana, were good pals).
He rises at six, works all hours on his wedding business and wears holey jumpers.
‘Most women don’t understand,’ he says. ‘It’s a nightmare running this place. the heating bill’s £50,000 a year. they don’t tend to stay.’
He is also constantly tired thanks to a sleep disorder, and has suffered a brief problem with his prostate — or ‘bicycle pump’, as he calls it — which he keeps ‘fired up’ with oysters. Other than that, he claims to be
in excellent health and even hangs upside down in a harness every morning to reduce stress.
‘Stress is not good — and it’s not good for down there, either,’ he says, stabbing at his crotch yet again. ‘That’s why I need a good woman to help with it all. A good woman could be worth £100k to me, minimum, and she could pop out some heirs while she’s at it.’ But, given his health problem, is
he up to the job? ‘Mao Tse Tung was bonking away when he was 80! So was Moses. I’m slowing down a bit — I just don’t get enough practice in,’ he says sadly.
Then he tells me he isn’t a fan of Viagra, preferring a similar drug called Cialis: ‘It’s really good — lasts all weekend.’
There is also a concoction that his French nephew obtains from the Far East, which he puts in his tea and which makes him ‘go like greased lightning’.
I wonder if all this is bluster and fantasy. So we move back to his childhood, which went from happy to unutterably miserable when he was ten and his elder brother died (in a car crash), followed by his mother the next year, then his uncle, then his father the year after that.
Young Ben was shipped off to a distant relative for his troubled teens, then packed off to Australia on a one-way ticket, where he worked in the mines and on sheep stations and slept rough.
Despite having to overcome the odds, his grief and terrible dyslexia, he pulled through, made a fortune in shipping and bought back the family seat from his aunt.
Given the parallels, I ask about Prince Harry’s mental health charity. But he just harrumphs.
‘They’re all nuts, really. And his mother was totally screwed up. Everyone knows there are three families you should never marry into and the Spencers is one!’
It is easy to see why he wants children — ‘If I drop dead today, this place will be on the market in a month’ — and he is convinced he’d make a good father.
‘People tell me “you’re too old. You’ll die”. So what? I was bloody orphaned. Anyway, a nice young attractive widow with two castles and a title is going to get snapped up pretty quickly.’
What is surprising is that he never did manage to father a child, despite all that frantic rutting. He blames what he calls ‘Fallopian complications’ and claims ‘too many cats’ were responsible for his marriage failure. But what about adoption? He looks horrified. ‘ People don’t give anything away that’s any good, do they?’ And a baby from overseas, he says, was completely out of the question. ‘If you’re living in the countryside and into hunting and shooting, an Aboriginal or an African probably wouldn’t go down too well round here. They might not let someone like me adopt anyway.’ That is probably the wisest thing he has said so far. On the flip side, though, having Sir Ben as your dad might be a relentlessly politically incorrect experience and you’d never dare bring anyone home for tea, but it would never be dull. He is the sort of man who throws wild parties, has 5,000 people in his address book and is someone to whom mad things inevitably happen. Who else would have a peacock called Ron Davies (after the Labour MP whose career was destroyed by a ‘ moment of madness’ involving a homosexual encounter on Clapham Common) which caused £4,000 damage to a peacock-blue car in a bout of misplaced ardour? Sir Ben also cited a tomcat as co-respondent in his divorce. Then there was the time he went to court to fight for custody of a rescue dog called Jasper that had been rehomed to a brewery heiress. He was bequeathed to Slade, along with a trust fund that rose in value to £100,000 when his owner died. Extraordinarily, Sir Ben’s exes seem genuinely fond of him. ‘For some reason they all want to come back — even Kirsten, who behaved disgracefully. Because I might not be the best looker but there’s always something happening and I make them laugh.’ And then, just as he is finally starting to sound more like a naughty uncle than a sexist oaf, he blows it by describing the shape of his favourite breasts. ‘I do like them pointing upwards. I once had an American girlfriend who had them pointing upwards. Just wonderful. And big, ideally, but I certainly don’t want some tired old flap they can throw over the shoulder!’ Oh stop it, Sir Ben! You are clearly far brighter than you let on and work like a Trojan, but it’s as if you have a constant need to offend — especially when, against all odds, someone might actually be warming to you.