Barclays bigwig seals the deal with wife No2
THeSe are disconcerting times for senior Barclays figures past and present. They are awaiting an announcement from the Serious Fraud Office as to whether criminal charges will be brought against them in consequence of an emergency £8billion fundraising agreement the bank reached with Qatar and Abu Dhabi in 2008.
There is, however, a ray of light in the life of John Varley, 61 — now a trustee of The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation, but Barclays’ £1million-a-year chief executive when the deal was struck. I can disclose he has recently divorced his wife of more than 30 years and is now to marry Bettina von Hase, the glamorous daughter of a former German ambassador to the UK.
The pair met at Oxford in the Seventies. ‘John was a year ahead of her,’ says a friend, adding that Bettina’s boyfriend at the time was Rupert Birley, elder son of Lady Annabel Goldsmith by her first husband, Mark Birley, who named his legendary Berkeley Square nightclub in her honour.
‘John and Rupert had tutorials together. That’s how John met Bettina.’ At the time, there was no romance. Instead, Varley married Carolyn Pease, whose sister Nichola is the wife of tycoon Crispin Odey.
Von Hase, 60, who runs art advisory firm Nine AM, remained unmarried, parting from Rupert before he died in mysterious circumstances while swimming off the coast of West Africa in 1986, aged 30. His body was never found.
Decades later, the path of true love has not run smoothly. I understand the couple last year postponed their marriage at short notice, owing to serious illness.
Now, though, Varley is fully recovered and will marry Bettina in London in October, in a small, intimate occasion.
No room, then, for Amanda Staveley: the Duke of York’s old flame is suing Barclays (in an action entirely separate from the SFO one) for £780 million, in a case the bank has described as ‘misconceived’.