Why Bianca has to axe her boho Cornish festival

AnYonE for tennis? not Judy Murray, mother of Sir Andy and Jamie. ‘I don’t play tennis any more because my life got saturated with it,’ she tells me. ‘With me working in it and the boys playing it all the time, I got fed up and stopped playing. If I have free time I would rather not be anywhere near a tennis court.’

Billed as Cornwall’s greatest annual arts jamboree, it was the sort of place where Kate Winslet could be found reading children’s stories and artist Grayson Perry spotted charging around on a pink motorbike.

But i can reveal this month’s Port eliot Festival, held at the home of the 11th earl of St Germans, is to be the last.

Bianca eliot, current chatelaine of 124-room Port eliot house, confirms the show has been axed, because it is failing to pay its way.

‘it’s extremely difficult to make the festivals financially viable,’ Bianca, right, tells me. ‘We’re incredibly sad that this is the last show.’

Her dismay is understandable. The festival’s first incarnation was in 1981 when her late father-in-law, Perry, 10th earl of St Germans, held the inaugural elephant Fayre, notable for two performers, Boris and Norris, who juggled live rats.

Five years later, the festival was abandoned after it was invaded by an unruly mob who looted stallholders. it was later revived as the Port eliot Festival in 2003 by

Perry’s sons, Jago and louis. ‘i think 40 people came,’ remembers Bianca, who had married Jago a year earlier at Glastonbury. Nowadays she can hope for crowds of up to 10,000.

even Jago’s sudden death — suffering an epileptic fit in the bath aged 40 in 2006 — failed to derail the annual celebration. ‘ What i’ve loved about it is that the team refused to go down the corporate route,’ says Bianca. ‘They’ve retained the festival’s integrity, which goes right back to the spirit of the elephant Fayre.’

Bianca now shares her life with Mark Tamburrano and her children by Jago — 14year- old son Albie, the 11th earl of St Germans, and twin daughters, Ruby and Violet. How fitting that lily Allen is to perform at the festival later this month.

The pop singer insists that she was conceived at the elephant Fayre back in the eighties.