A sparkling proposal from Lord Hesketh’s high-flying son...

Hesketh’s daughter — Freddie’s older sister — Sophia, 35, who posted a snap of the couple on social media (left).

‘Couldn’t be happier that Petrina said yes,’ she wrote, as the bride-to-be flashed her sparkler.

In his pomp, Lord Heske t h , now 68, appeared unstoppable, funding his own Formula One racing team in the Seventies, arriving for the Monaco Grand Prix by yacht, and creating the Hesketh Superbike in the following decade.

Freddie appears to favour an even more elevated form of transport: he works as an aircraft consultant.

THE once ebullient Lord Hesketh has lived life in a lower key since 2005, when the urgent need to economise led him to sell Easton Neston, the stately Northamptonshire seat and its surrounding 3,300 acres, which had been in his family for nearly 500 years. The house was snapped up by Russian-American rag-trade tycoon Leon Max for £15 million. But there should be a spring in Hesketh’s step today, for I can disclose that his only son, Freddie, 30, has become engaged to Bella Freud’s glamorous right-hand PR woman, Petrina Nystrom. The news was shared by