Tom is the guy you want to introduce to your mother
aLmOST exactly a year to the day that Prince Harry married meghan markle, Windsor is gearing up for another royal wedding. Once again the ceremony will be held in St George’s Chapel, and the Queen will be among the smiling guests.
But that is where the similarity ends. This time, there will be no horse-drawn carriage ride, no official range of commemorative china and no flag-waving members of the public straining to catch a glimpse of the bride and groom.
The wedding of Lady Gabriella Windsor, daughter of Princess michael of Kent, to banker Tom Kingston has no constitutional implications — she is, after all, 51st in line to the throne — and ella, as she is known to friends, is not a working member of the Royal Family and performs no public duties.
Yet somehow after the glitz and glamour of Hollywood that descended on Windsor for former actress meghan’s nuptials, the newest recruit to royal ranks will bring not just charm and good looks, but a whiff of derring- do. Fifteen years ago, ella’s fiancé was working in Baghdad in the dangerous world of hostage negotiation, helping to free captives from the bloodthirsty militias spawned in the wake of the ill-fated war in Iraq.
He had countless narrow escapes in three actionpacked years in the Iraqi capital, where he served in the diplomatic missions unit of the Foreign Office, including escaping a suicide-bombing that claimed 22 lives.
No one knew him better in those perilous times than the Reverend Canon Andrew White, who for more than ten years presided over the only Anglican church in Iraq, a role that led to him being dubbed the Vicar of Baghdad.
Yesterday, he recalled Kingston as ‘ an exceptional young man’ who ‘makes things happen’. His great strength, he said, was to ‘ see beyond the impossible’.
Like the priest with whom he shared a strong faith, Kingston was also an ‘adrenaline junkie’. He helped with his ministry, which built up a following of 6,500 worshippers.
Canon White added: ‘Tom is one of the most remarkable people I have ever worked with and I would have him back at my side tomorrow, if he would come.’
Godliness, however, was not his only quality.
For Kingston, who will be 41 in June, is someone who has always flitted discreetly in and around royal circles, a man about whom friends like to tell tales of amorous adventures. WOmeN
are drawn to his languid confidence, while men have envied his effortless success with the opposite sex.
Indeed, he has attracted some of the prettiest young women around the Prince William and Prince Harry sets.
Among them were Pippa middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister, now married to hedge fund executive James matthews — although he denied they were romantically linked — financier Louisa Strutt and Natalie Hicks-Lobbecke, an old flame of Prince William whom he dated while working in Iraq.
He and ‘ Nats’, who is now married to baronet’s son ed milbank, met when both were at Bristol University.
As one close friend said admiringly: ‘ Tom’s great achievement is that none of his old girlfriends have anything but nice things to say about him. even when it’s all over, they still like him.
‘In old-fashioned terms, he is a gentleman, just the kind of guy you want to introduce to your mother.’
A male friend adds this: ‘He’s one of those guys who can be quite enigmatic and doesn’t tell you what he is thinking. He’s careful. Perhaps it’s a legacy from the work he was doing in Iraq.’
Pointedly, his stag dinner at White’s, the St James’s club, was said to be ‘quiet’.
All in all, these could be valuable qualities as he contemplates life as Princess michael of Kent’s son-in-law. She is said to like him enormously and has remarked on his perfect manners.
In an observation many might think typical of the princess, she has also noted that Tom is ‘a bit short’. But then the lofty former secretary marie Christine von Reibnitz speaks from a position of authority, having introduced height into the House of Windsor.
While friends say the princess may once have had hopes that her only daughter would be betrothed to a duke or, better still, european nobility — it’s said ella studied Spanish at exclusive Downe House school because of her mother’s dreams that she might marry into Spain’s aristocracy — she is happy about the union.
(ella went on to graduate from Ivy League Brown University in the U.S. and Oxford, with degrees in comparative literature and social anthropology, and is now a director at Knightsbridge-based Branding Latin America, which promotes that continent in europe.)
One thing is certain: with Tom Kingston there is no question of Princess michael experiencing again the touch of the vapours that followed an extraordinary article in the magazine Vanity Fair which raised the issue of racism and the royals last year. THe
article was written by a former boyfriend of Lady Gabriella, Aatish Taseer, a young man with a Sikh mother and muslim father who, a few years back, some thought might become the michaels’ son-in-law.
He dated ella, 38 next month, for three years between 2003 and 2006 and he is now married to a man.
In the article, he flippantly declared that ‘ royals and Nazis go together like blini and caviar’ and claimed that Princess michael owned two black sheep at her former country home, where he often stayed, which she named Venus and Serena after the African-American Williams tennis sisters.
Piquantly, he wrote that the princess, although ‘ generally free of British colonial prejudices’, was nonetheless ‘of the firm belief that it was a bad idea for royalty to marry commoners’.
While Princess michael was understandably deeply hurt by the betrayal, it was nothing compared with the great embarrassment Taseer dealt ex-girlfriend ella.
For he boasted that they had swum naked in the Queen’s swimming pool at Buckingham Palace and, more worryingly, that they had taken the drug mDmA — ecstasy — while guests at Windsor Castle.
At the time, a friend of ella was reported as describing the allegation as ‘fiction’. ‘Aatish is a novelist. He has an active imagination,’ they said.
All the same, the revelations left courtiers stunned, not least because ella, who has never put a foot wrong, has always been a favourite of the Queen. Happily, there was no lasting damage.
‘ Her majesty agreed to attend her wedding at once,’ I am told. Interestingly, the Queen was not at the Hampton Court ceremony of ella’s brother, Lord Frederick Windsor, to actress Sophie Winkleman in 2009. As a young man, Freddie found himself in a number of colourful scrapes when he was dubbed London’s ‘most louche lord’.
For ella, the Taseer episode brought her and Kingston closer. They announced their engagement a few days before Christmas, four years after first going out.
He proposed on Sark in the Channel Islands, where his parents martin and Jill have a holiday home.
Following other recent newcomers to the Royal Family — Kate middleton, greatgranddaughter of a coalminer, and meghan markle, descended from American cotton slaves — Kingston also solidly fits the new egalitarianism of the Windsors.
His family’s background includes a former ambassador to Denmark and a greatgrandfather who was thrice mayor of Walsall in the West midlands. Tom, who has two