Life In Brief

PRINCE MICHAEL OF KENT’S SON-IN-LAW

Thomas Kingston, the husband of Lady Gabriella Windsor, has died at the age of 45. An inquest heard that Kingston died from a “traumatic head wound” and that a gun was found nearby. Police are not treating his death as suspicious.

Lady Gabriella’s father, Prince Michael, is a first cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth II, and Lady Gabriella is 56th in line to the throne. In a statement, she described her husband as an “exceptional man who lit up the lives of all who knew him”.

A spokesman for Buckingham Palace said: “Their Majesties send their most heartfelt thoughts and prayers to Gabriella and all the Kingston family.”

Kingston was born in 1978 to Martin, a barrister and King’s Counsel who specialised in planning, and Jill. She has long been involved in the church, and Martin joined the General Synod of the Church of England in 2016.

Kingston’s own faith stayed with him through his life, to the extent that when he got to Bristol University, having left Dean Close boarding school, he was known as “Christian Tom”. He studied economic history before joining the Foreign Office’s diplomatic missions unit.

“The thing about Tom was that he was never scared,” Rev Canon Andrew White – who worked closely with Kingston in Iraq, when he was seconded from the Foreign Office to be a project manager for the International Centre for Reconciliation – told The Daily Telegraph. “Whatever I asked him to do he would do it with a big smile on his face in the middle of a war zone.”

Kingston’s work in Baghdad between 2003 and 2006 included negotiating the release of hostages and mediation between tribal and political leaders.

It was dangerous, and on one occasion in 2004 Kingston survived an attack which killed 22 people.

“We were regularly caught up in improvised explosive device attacks,” Canon White said. “Cars would blow up in front of us and we would just move on. We were always together and had 35 armed guards at all times.”

The church in which Canon White and Kingston worked was housed in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, and took one of his thrones as its pulpit.

After leaving Iraq, Kingston moved into finance with the asset management company Schroders. He subsequently became managing director at Voltan Capital Management and then director at Devonport Capital.

His engagement to Lady Gabriella was announced by Buckingham Palace on 19 September 2018, after Kingston proposed on the Channel Island of

Sark in August. They married at St George’s Chapel in Windsor on 18 May 2019, where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had wed less than a year before. The Kingstons’ service was attended by guests including the Queen and Prince Philip.

Kingston and Lady Gabriella did not have any children.

Born 22 June 1978 Died 25 February 2024 Tom Nicholson