Bear Grylls’ quest to find friend’s body on Everest

USED to fighting off poisonous snakes and wrestling alligators, television adventurer Bear Grylls has secretly undertaken his most heartfelt challenge.

I can reveal that the Chief Scout, who counts the Princess of Wales among his friends, led an expedition to Mount Everest earlier this year to try to recover the body of Pippa Middleton’s brother-in-law.

Michael Matthews died in 1999 in a mountaineering accident, hours after becoming the youngest Briton to conquer the world’s highest peak at the age of 22. His family are desperate to find his body. He was following the example of his friend Grylls, who had reached the summit of Everest the previous year at the age of 23.

Michael was the brother of Pippa’s husband, racing driver turned hedge fund manager James Matthews, 47. He and his brother, the Made In Chelsea star Spencer Matthews, are friends of Bear, 48, son of late Tory MP Sir Michael Grylls.

‘We actually had an expedition on Everest to try to recover the body of the brother of a good friend, who climbed it the year after I was there but was never found,’ confirms Grylls, who once circumnavigated Britain on jet skis and crossed the Atlantic in an inflatable dinghy.

‘We really tried. We had the best team in the world.’

Speaking at the Oxford Union, the Old Etonian explains: ‘We had a team of, like, ten Nepalese guys and some other incredible Western climbers. We did manage to recover one body. It was not of Michael; it was a Nepalese climber.’

Grylls, who has attracted big names including former U.S. President Barack Obama and Hollywood stars Kate Winslet and Ben Stiller to appear on his show, Running Wild With Bear Grylls, adds: ‘The story has not come out yet, so I am not going to talk too much about it, but it was a really special moment for [Michael’s] family.

‘It is the reality of high-altitude mountaineering, as people pay the ultimate price up there.’

n THE Duke of Marlborough, who announced plans for the country’s biggest solar farm on his Blenheim Palace estate in Oxfordshire, has received a financial blow. ‘With a very heavy heart’, the Jockey Club has ended its contract to organise the Blenheim Palace International Horse Trials, one of Britain’s biggest equestrian events. A spokesman explains: ‘The current economic climate is unfortunately going to have an impact on us all.’ When the lucrative fiveyear deal was announced in 2020, Blenheim said the Jockey Club had ‘secured’ the future of the event.