Now heir to Broadlands lives in flat for the poor
HE IS due to inherit Broadlands, the 60room Palladian mansion where the Queen began her honeymoon, but Nicholas Knatchbull has clearly fallen on hard times judging by his latest accommodation: a housing association flat meant for the low-paid.
With a shaven head and dressed in a grey hoodie, Earl Mountbatten of Burma’s great-grandson does not look out of place as he walks past the rubbish piled up outside the converted house owned by the Notting Hill Housing Trust.
He shares the flat, in a corner of West London notorious for a huge council estate blighted by crime, with his fiancee Raz Tedros, a nurse whose family are from Eritrea. ‘Raz and Nick’ live upstairs, said a ground- floor tenant when I inquired after the 33year-old godson of Prince Charles.
Knatchbull, who has fought past battles against heroin and crack cocaine addiction, is the son and heir of Lord Brabourne and stands to inherit the Mountbattens’ £100 million fortune.
He is now trying to make a name for himself as an artist. When flogging his ‘digital art’ via auction website eBay, Knatchbull uses the moniker ‘5DN’, or Five Dimensional Nick, instead of his official title, Lord Romsey.
On the site, the closest reference to Eton — where he was a friend of Prince William — or his family’s ancestral seat in Hampshire is that he ‘grew up in the countryside of southern England’.
The estate has been run by his mother, Penelope, a 61-year-old carriage-driving
companion of Prince Philip, since his father, Norton, moved to the Bahamas in 2010 to be with the vivacious fashion designer lady Nuttall.
When that relationship foundered, lord Brabourne, 67, who is in poor health, returned to Broadlands. however, he is not living with his wife, but elsewhere on the estate. earlier this year, I reported that Norton, who was a friend and mentor to Charles, had been forced to give up all official duties after becoming seriously ill.
Norton married Penelope two months after the IRA’s 1979 assassination of his grandfather lord Mountbatten, which also killed three others, including Norton’s youngest brother, Nicholas, and his grandmother, the dowager lady Brabourne. his daughter, leonora, died of cancer aged five.
Knatchbull was not available for comment.