Why is coroner refusing death certificate for colourful QC?
Few have lived more exuberantly than Sir Desmond de Silva QC, who was one of the first barristers to earn £1 million a year and reputedly had foie gras flown out to his hotel in west Africa while prosecuting a case there.
But I can disclose there has been a bizarre and distressing postscript to de Silva’s remarkable life: more than ten weeks after his death from heart failure, aged 78, a death certificate has yet to be issued — meaning that he remains unburied, as no interment is permitted without it.
‘It is too, too ghastly,’ says his younger sister, Helga de Silva Blow Perera, from her home in Sri Lanka, where she and Desmond grew up with visits from family friends such as Gandhi and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and where Lord Mountbatten came to Sunday lunch.
Helga adds that de Silva’s daughter, Victoria — his only child by ex-wife Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia — has explained to her that the coroner is continuing inquiries, though no further details are currently available.
A family friend says that de Silva’s health faltered last year, not long after he published his memoirs, Madam, where Are Your Mangoes? ‘He was in hospital for months — all over Christmas,’ I’m told.
But de Silva did manage to pay a final visit to Sri Lanka. ‘My brother came to see me to say goodbye,’ says Helga. ‘He looked out at the mountain where he grew up.
‘There was no outward emotion. But he was vulnerable.
‘He did not want anyone to know that he was coming. He knew he might not make it.’
De Silva married Princess Katarina, 21 years his junior, in 1987, but they divorced in 2010 after he announced to her that she wasn’t intelligent enough for him.
In his memoirs, he recalled how he evaded death in 1981 when prosecuting the ringleaders of a Marxist coup in The Gambia: pouring himself a glass of brandy in his hotel room, he noticed that it was discoloured — and decided against drinking it.
Analysis later showed that it had been lethally poisoned.