A most un-Ladylike bust-up
It’s the famously genteel magazine for discerning women ... so why is its 86-year-old matriarch having a ding-dong with her stately home owning successor — who just happens to be her ‘little monster’ of a son?
ThE magazine has graced some of Britain’s finest drawing rooms for more than a century. And today, The Lady is one of the few remaining institutions associated with good manners and proper behaviour.
Famous for its classified adverts, The Lady is Britain’s longest-running women’s weekly, and remains the first port of call for anyone seeking domestic staff.
Indeed, the Prince of Wales and Queen Mother are believed to have used it. And in the TV series Downton Abbey, when the chatelaine of the stately home needed to recruit a new lady’s maid for her motherin-law, she did so through The Lady.
Since 1885, it has been owned by the distinguished Bowles family. Over recent years, Mrs Julia Budworth — the granddaughter of the colourful politician and founder of Vanity Fair, Thomas Gibson Bowles — and her four sons harmoniously oversaw the title and its editors. Now, that family unity has been splintered.
Speaking from her Suffolk home this week, Mrs Budworth, 86, did not pull her punches when she explained what has led to the rancour between her family and son Ben, former managing director of The Lady, who has now taken sole control.
If 54-year-old Ben Budworth was still in short trousers his mother Julia would, no doubt, ask the nanny to give him a jolly good ticking off.
As it is, Mrs Budworth — a cousin to the Mitford sisters — can only despair of her thoroughly grown-up ‘little monster’s dotty behaviour’ (her words).
So what has brought about such discord?
Ben, the fourth of five sons, has, says Mrs Budworth, truly shattered her after taking over the magazine, which the family has run for more than a century.
Much to his brothers’ fury, Ben, who according to his mother ‘hasn’t got an exam to his name but is highly intelligent, be sure of that’, has not only taken ownership of The Lady but of the £6.2 million warrenlike Victorian building in covent Garden, London, that houses the magazine and was immortalised in P.G. Wodehouse’s carry On, Jeeves as Milady’s Boudoir.
The present offices, next door to where Mrs Budworth was born — ‘over the shop’ she says — are now being marketed by estate agent Savills as potential restaurant space, leaving staff at the magazine — which has survived two world wars and the hardships of the Depression — wondering what the future holds.
Mrs Budworth — who, to many who know her, was The Lady — is outraged. For the past two years, she hasn’t so much as heard a word from Ben, who now lives with his long-term partner and The Lady’s managing director helen Robinson in a £1.9million stately pile, Bylaugh hall in Norfolk, which he intends to run as a butler school and where he keeps his privately owned helicopter.
‘Who would buy a helicopter?’ asks Mrs Budworth. ‘For heaven’s sake, hire one if you must. What’s the matter with the boy?
‘One of my perfectly OK sons — really goodhearted, well-meaning — has turned into a real horror. crablike, Ben’s taken over everything. he’s even done down his own mother.’
We meet miles from the magazine’s London offices, where Mrs Budworth is pouring iced tea in her drawing room overlooking fields at her home near Stowmarket.
A widow since her husband, David, died in an air crash in 1974 — sadly followed 18 years later by her middle son, Alexander, who suffered with epilepsy — Mrs Budworth is from a generation that soldiers on. And she retains a ready wit.
According to the family, Ben paid his siblings and mother £6,000 for their remaining shares in The Lady three months ago, after they were advised the company was insolvent with a £1.2 million debt.
Facing a threat of liquidation, Ben wanted sole ownership, presumably so he could present The Lady Limited (as the company is called) to potential investors as being free from a share dispute.
his brothers felt they had little choice but to sell their shares to Ben to protect the £122,000 that remained outstanding of their mother’s earlier £500,000 investment. ‘We are astounded by his behaviour,’ says Mrs Budworth. ‘What’s gone wrong? I wish we could ask him, but the difficulty is we can’t get hold of him. he’s not answered two birthday cards, not answered anything.
‘I’ve been trying to work it out in my own mind, which is why I think he must be a bit dotty.
‘Of course I’m still fond of him. I am his mother after all, but it’s all plain wrong. Ben’s just cheerfully helped himself to everything and, of course the brothers are furious and I’m not over delighted, but some families have a black sheep.
‘At least one of our accountants actually thinks the takeover is rather “clever” of him.’
She says Adam, her 52-year-old youngest son who is a barrister, and Richard, 64, her eldest child and also a barrister, are horrified.
‘This accountant says it is legal. Whatever, it’s dreadful.’
Mrs Budworth cares deeply about The Lady’s dedicated staff, some of whom have worked there for 40 years. The editors, she muses ‘were always good one way or the other’. Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel was famously brought in by Ben shortly after he became managing director in 2008 to give The Lady a facelift.
Mrs Budworth was furious when, in a 2010 channel 4 documentary, The Lady And the Revamp, Rachel described it as ‘a piddling little magazine no one cares about’.
‘That’s when I waltzed into the office and said: “I’ve come to murder the editor. Is she around?” I found her upstairs cowering behind her desk. Debo [the late Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and Mrs Budworth’s cousin] said it was, “awful, awful”.’
ShE ADDS: ‘Actually, I like the Johnsons. They are a very colourful family. Life would be so much duller without them. I, myself, come from a similar family and recognise a fellow traveller.’
Rachel Johnson left The Lady in 2012 and was succeeded by Matt Warren — the publication’s first ever male editor, who won plaudits during his three-year tenure.
he stepped down in 2015, making way for the ‘splendid’ — according to Mrs Budworth — current editor, Sam Taylor.
Mrs Budworth took over the magazine in 2008, when her brother Tom Bowles, who inherited a majority shareholding in The Lady from their father, was considering closing it. ‘he had the lion’s share and I had the mouse’s share — two-sevenths. I thought closing it was a terrible thing to do. Tom ran it as best as he could, but I don’t think his heart was ever in it.’
Mrs Budworth’s heart certainly was. She invested £500,000 of her own money and divided the shares equally between herself and her four sons.
‘Ben had run two small companies of his own, quite successfully. he was the only one of the boys who looked like being able to take it on. he’d just come back from America, where he trained as a helicopter pilot, and was free.
‘So I said to Tom: “What about Ben running it?” Tom kicked up a frightful hullaballoo, saying: “No, no certainly not.” So, with the utmost difficulty I — in my son Adam’s words — “shoehorned” Ben through the door and into meetings where he actually frightfully impressed Tom.
‘So he became managing director. Nobody could foresee what has occurred since.
‘To begin with, it was fine. Ben and I were on the telephone every Saturday going through every copy of The Lady page by page. Then Rachel came on board and
Ben started these quarrels. He came down for Christmas on his own and when I said, in passing, I hadn’t had a card from Rachel, he flew at me. I couldn’t see why he should be so very, very angry about it. Pigheaded, I think, is the best description of this behaviour. It sort of really started from there.’
Rachel was replaced as editor in January 2012, shortly after Ben began a relationship with his then head of sales, Helen Robinson.
Seven months later, he asked his mother and brothers at a board meeting to give him a controlling interest in the company.
Ben argued that he had turned the company around since 2008, saying at times he had not even drawn a salary, so a larger shareholding was rightfully his. In exchange, he said that, should Uncle Tom leave his properties to him in his will, Ben would transfer them to the company.
‘We refused,’ says Mrs Budworth. ‘There was a fracas, as one can imagine. Helen burst into tears.
‘Then, that September, we were told there was a big problem and the Inland Revenue people would come in and take the pictures off the wall unless one of us could produce a total of £91,000 by the end of the week or something quite shocking like that. None of us could lay our hands on that sort of money in a matter of days.’
Ben said in that board meeting that he had done all within his power to find reinvestment for the magazine, which he was able to secure only if he was a controlling shareholder.
‘He said he could secure investment as he had, before, from Helen’s parents without a word to me. They were very nice people, actually. Ben told us to trust him. He said there was no time to get the agreement formally drawn up by lawyers because the men from the Inland Revenue were coming in the next Monday morning.
‘Of course, both my sons were barristers, so I thought they must know what they were doing.
‘They said they couldn’t see any other way out. We agreed to give him control and said lawyers should draw up a share agreement afterwards.’
Adam Budworth was given a hand in formalising what had been agreed. ‘I was the only one saying, “this is ridiculous or nonsense”, or words to that effect. There’s a recording.’
Mrs Budworth accepted the company was in danger of financial ruin so agreed to secure investment for the magazine she had held dear since taking tea and crumpets in her father’s office as a child.
‘After that, he treated us all like mud. One way and another we’ve had a merry mess this last six years. It’s been horrible. What was it all about? We’ve helped him as much as we possibly could — financially and in every other way.’
Eighteen months after that meeting, Mrs Budworth, who had provided the deposit for Ben’s flat in Battersea years before, gave her permission for his home to be used as surety for the purchase of Bylaugh Hall.
‘They were very polite to me until they got my signature for their enormous dotty palace. They were very pleased when they bought it.
‘I went up there. They took me round and we had lunch at a local pub. I said: “Well, after a year when you’ve got the butler school going I’d be interested to see the balance sheets.”
‘Helen said: “It’s nothing to do with you.” Of course, at the time, I should have said, “Well, you couldn’t be here without my signature actually”, but I didn’t.
‘I could feel Ben’s discomfort. He wasn’t very happy either, so we sort of talked around it. That was the first time Helen had crossed me. I haven’t been to Bylaugh since.’
BOARd meetings were soon punctuated with furious rows, sometimes hilariously so. For example, when Ben defended his £80,000 salary, which is all recorded in the company minutes . . .
‘I’ve taken a s**t company off the rocks. I’ve sorted it out and £80,000 is about a quarter of what you would earn in the private sector running this sort of operation.’ Mrs Budworth disagreed: ‘No.’ ‘Yes,’ insisted Ben. Mrs Budworth argued: ‘If you have what you would politely call a s**t company, I don’t think you would be able to take much more [money].’
‘You either laugh or scream,’ she says now. ‘That meeting broke up in great annoyance and Ben hasn’t really been speaking to us since.
‘Then, last year, my brother Tom sold him the building. We were never told, much less consulted. We learned about it second-hand, which was astonishing.
‘In the board meeting when I, seeing no alternative, agreed, with the boys to give Ben controlling interest in The Lady, he said: “The Lady is a family business, the buildings have been family buildings for years and years. I don’t mean to sound like Tony Blair, but you guys are going to have to trust me.” ’
It was completely within Tom’s gift to sell the buildings to who ever he chose. He did so in September last year when Ben bought the property in Soho for the market value of £6.2 million after taking out a £7.4 million shortterm loan to transform the magazine’s headquarters into restaurant and retail space, with offices and residential space above.
His uncle has a 20-year lease to remain in his 16-room apartment. To date, only a pre-application for change of use has been lodged with Westminster planning department.
‘Now Ben even has a helicopter,’ says Mrs Budworth. ‘I knew he’d got one because a helicopter, that I assume was his, was swooping around here eight weeks or so ago. Notice he doesn’t land and come in for a cup of tea. Oh no. He wouldn’t dare do that. He runs a mile from me, as well he might.
‘I put Ben into The Lady to manage it the way my father managed it. We didn’t expect him to run out on all of us.
‘Now Adam has been told The Lady is £1.2million in debt. Ben said he feared he would have to put it into liquidation unless we handed over our remaining shares which, of course, would mean I’d lose what is owed to me from the £500,000 I put in to help The Lady.
‘About £120,000 is still owing. It may be more than that.
‘Adam had a furious row. He stood up to him and said: “All Mum’s ever tried to do is help you and all you’re doing is spitting in her eye.”
‘Ben has mopped up his family just like that. He’s even cleared out what was my father’s room and my grandfather’s room at The Lady.
‘There were two beautiful French writing tables — the real thing, not reproductions, worth an awful lot of money — and other really nice old furniture and ornaments, including a beautiful portrait of my grandfather by the French painter Chartran. They belong to all of us, but they’ve all been spirited away.
‘Ironically, originally in my will I had left him a large bookcase and dining room furniture from here which I thought would be useful to him. My other sons have smaller flats and Bylaugh Hall was very empty, so he needs the furniture. If only he’d just told us he was removing the paintings and desk from The Lady, but we heard nothing.
‘Looking back, the boys were a jolly little bunch. I was incredibly lucky. They never fought. They were very happy until Ben started his crablike movements.
‘None of us can really make sense of this. I just kept hoping he would come to his senses and not be quite such an idiot as to mess up his family life.
‘You’d understand it if we had all been at each other’s throats for years, but it was never like that. In his 20s, nobody was jollier than Ben. That’s why I say he must have gone completely bananas.
‘There’s no other way of explaining the extraordinary change that’s come over him since I shoehorned him into The Lady.’
despite approaches from the Mail, Ben Budworth declined to provide any comment for publication.