Riddle of drug-taking grandson of Liberal leader found dead in Danube
He was the scion of an aristocratic Scots family who introduced George Osborne to the notorious ‘Mistress Pain’ – and had a child with her. How did his body end up a Budapest river?
‘He was very funny, but a bit of a lost soul’
THE time is early evening, late summer in Budapest and three men are seen climbing onto the superstructure of the city’s landmark Chain Bridge. A tourist is filming them. Then comes disaster. One of the men either falls or jumps into the waters of the Danube below. He disappears and a few days later a body is found.
The tragedy had all the hallmarks of drunken high jinks gone wrong. In fact, it was simply the latest — and of course last — adventure of an extraordinary life that leaves even the strange manner of his death in the shade.
William Sinclair, who had been missing for two weeks before his body was found, was the handsome playboy grandson of the Liberal Party’s wartime leader, who partied hard with a future Chancellor, had a child with a dominatrix and lost his way in a blizzard of class A drugs.
His is no ordinary tale of gilded youth gone wrong. At one stage the former theology student modelled for Versace and worked in the bathroom department of Harrods.
But narcotic addiction also saw him accept £1,000 to take part in a sham marriage, rob the till of a friend’s coffee shop and, perhaps in an effort to clean up, join the Royal Navy as a rather aged junior rating.
To no avail, it seems. His body was pulled from the waters in the Hungarian capital a fortnight ago and his funeral will take place in London in the next few days.
One of his old friends yesterday described him as ‘the real life Patrick Melrose’ — after the drugaddled aristocrat central character in the books by Edward St Aubyn, played recently on television by Benedict Cumberbatch.
The fictional Melrose was not half as well connected.
Isaiah William Columba Stroma Sinclair — known as ‘Sincs’ to his friends, and William to his family — was born in London 47 years ago this summer.
His grandfather was Sir Archibald Sinclair. A professional soldier, he served in the Great War trenches as second-in-command to Winston Churchill during the latter’s time with the Royal Scots Fusiliers — the start of a long and mutually beneficial friendship.
In peacetime, Sir Archibald became a Liberal MP and by 1935 had risen to become the party’s leader. When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, he invited Sir Archibald to enter his coalition Cabinet as secretary of state for air, a position he retained until after VE Day. For this service he was made Viscount Thurso.
Outside politics, he was one of the largest landowners in Britain, with over 100,000 acres in Scotland. One of his daughters married into the Lyle sugar dynasty, while his second son, the Hon Angus Sinclair, married three times.
Angus’s second wife produced an only child — William. William followed his father and grandfather to Eton. One contemporary recalled yesterday: ‘He was incredibly intelligent, absolutely manic and very funny. But I thought he was a bit of a lost soul when not doing ridiculous pranks.’
Others spoke of a distant relationship with his parents, now both dead.
After Eton, Sinclair went to Bristol University, but did not finish his degree. As a student, he liked to motor over to Oxford where several of his Old Etonian friends were studying.
Through them, he met other wealthy, interesting or well-connected young people. The common denominator was a hedonistic approach to life.
Among members of this circle were Nat Rothschild of the banking dynasty, George Osborne, who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Hon Mark Petre, who also struggled with drug addiction and was found dead at his family’s home aged 34.
After graduation, these friendships held firm as they threw themselves into the demi-monde of early Nineties London.
Sinclair drank hard and took lots of cocaine. Tall and slim, with black hair and blue eyes, he was also devastatingly attractive to women.
One contemporary remembers a particular country house weekend party. ‘Along with all the couples, there were four single girls there. Over the weekend Sincs slept with all of the single girls, one after the other, with everyone aware of what was happening.’
But he was about to ‘settle down’ and in the most unexpected circumstances. Enter Natalie Rowe, aka Mistress Pain, perhaps the most flamboyant and notorious of all the extraordinary characters in Sinclair’s life.
Eight years his senior, Rowe was a dominatrix prostitute and madam who ran an escort agency called Black Beauties.
As the name indicates, her background was a good deal different from that of the scion of a political dynasty. Born in Bradford to Jamaican parents, she had run away to London as a teenager and became first a chambermaid, then a hostess in Soho.
Her sex industry career began when she realised some wealthy high-society characters liked to sleep with black girls. A good deal of her clientele also liked to be beaten, whipped and chained and would pay good money — some £350 an hour — for the experience.
In her highly contentious 2015 autobiography Whipping Up A Storm, Rowe, who appeared on Big Brother in 2016, wrote that she had ‘spotted’ Sinclair at another table when she was dining with friends at a restaurant called The Face in Chelsea. The year was 1992 and Sinclair was still 21.
‘He was dark-haired, slim, in his early 20s, wearing a nicely cut suit and tie, and I was instantly attracted to him,’ she said. ‘I was trying to concentrate on the company I was in, but I couldn’t.’
She added: ‘William was one of the most handsome men ever (still is).’ She asked her own surprisingly obliging date to follow Sinclair into the lavatory and tell him she thought he was ‘gorgeous’.
Afterwards she persuaded him to join her at a nightclub. They drank champagne and, later, ‘we did a few lines of charlie [cocaine] and had wonderful sex.’
Sinclair, she said, was ‘smart and funny’ and ‘had not the slightest inhibition’, sometimes standing on tables in wine bars and reciting Shakespeare.
It was through Sinclair’s Old Etonian friend Christopher Coleridge, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a distant relation, that she met Osborne. The would-be politician had been with Coleridge (who is due to give the oration at Sinclair’s funeral) at Oxford, where they were both members of the hell-raising Bullingdon Club.
In 2005, shortly after Osborne had become shadow chancellor, a photograph of him aged 22 was
leaked to the Press. It showed him looking rather dishevelled and sitting next to Rowe, who was identified as a prostitute, with his arm around her shoulders and a smile on his face.
On the table in front of them was a bottle of a wine and what was alleged to be a quantity of cocaine.
Osborne has always denied using cocaine, as well as all other allegations made against him by Rowe.
Sinclair moved in with Rowe in early 1994. By then, she later recalled, his hedonism had taken a dark turn.
‘When I first met William it was all fun and games, a breath of fresh air,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘He gave the impression that he had the constitution of Keith Richards and could handle any amount of alcohol and although we all did coke, I just can’t put my finger on when it escalated to crack.’
By then, Rowe had become pregnant with Sinclair’s child. Despite this, his drug issues only grew worse. On one occasion he spent 36 hours in a crack den. On another he was so aggressive towards his partner she called the police.
Other contemporaries recall Sinclair at his most extreme. ‘He was absolutely nuts,’ said one. ‘A completely out-of-control person.’
Another said: ‘He was a crazy lord of misrule. That could be great fun. But he could also be quite frightening. He had no “off” switch.’
One story Sinclair told to friends was of how he had walked in on one of his partner’s bondage sessions with a paying client. The man was chained to a radiator and had to watch as Sinclair had sex with Rowe before leaving the room.
Sinclair even snorted cocaine in the hospital en-suite bathroom while Rowe was in labour with their son Nicholas in the next room.
The baby was given the middle name Gladstone, after the Liberal prime minister who spent his evenings attempting to ‘save’ ladies of the night. On the birth certificate, Sinclair’s occupation was given as ‘hotel marketing’, the mother’s as ‘singer’.
The arrival of Nicholas — now a successful fashion model — in no way curbed his father’s behaviour.
Five months later, Rowe threw him out. His mother, Judith Sinclair, only found out about the baby when she rang a strange number she found on her phone.
A woman answered and, when Mrs Sinclair introduced herself, she said: ‘Oh, yes, we have a grandson together.’ It was Natalie Rowe’s mother.
The revelation did not please Sinclair’s parents, who were in no rush to see their grandson.
Various friends tried to save Sinclair. One who managed a coffee bar in the City gave him a job.
That ended after Sinclair spent all the takings on drugs having been left in charge for the day.
Another found him a position as a manager of a five-star boutique hotel in Chelsea. That didn’t last long, either.
He needed large amounts of money to feed his habit and would go to any lengths. In late 1994, he married a pretty Yugoslav called Stasha who, according to Rowe, simply needed a wedding certificate to stay in the UK.
The £1,000 in cash Sinclair was given for going through with the marriage was immediately spent by him on crack.
In the last two decades, Sinclair’s contact with many of those who knew him in the years before crack took its hold has been sporadic.
One acquaintance, who knew him in his early 20s, said: ‘People who had been old friends grew rather tired of him crashing on their sofas in a mess. He was on-off-on drugs and you never knew which. He would outstay his welcome, leave and then you would not hear from him for months.’
One met him at a fancy dress party ‘about a decade or so ago’ when Sinclair was wearing naval uniform. He complimented him on the outfit to be told by Sinclair that he had, in fact, joined the Senior Service as a rating at the age of 36. More recently, he was teaching English as a foreign language in Rome, where again he battled drugs and drink problems. ‘He was one of those people who did a million jobs and none of them worked out,’ said a friend. ‘He was the kind of person everyone talked about because he was always getting into scrapes.’ In 2015, Natalie Rowe had written: ‘Today William has a great relationship with me and an even better one with our son and more importantly is drug and alcohol-free’. If he was, then it didn’t seem to last for long. Reports in Budapest yesterday said Sinclair’s body was found near the Csepel Island. His death is being linked to that incident one evening earlier this month when three men were seen climbing on the Chain Bridge over the Danube. Two of the men appeared to be filming while the other, thought to have been Sinclair, jumped into the river after getting off a tour bus and taking off his trousers.
Another report has suggested the three men were not together and the two had tried to help the third.
Authorities are working on the theory that the death was the result of either an accident or suicide. An autopsy has taken place and the police have not yet closed the case.
A friend of Sinclair told the Mail: ‘It was a moment of bravado that just went wrong.’
One old friend last night offered a picture of Sinclair away from the grip of hard drugs.
‘As well as being very good-looking, he had a very charming way with him,’ the friend recalled. ‘Your heart lifted on seeing him because he was so amusing and amused.
‘You might not see him for years but you could pick up conversation again with him very easily. I was extremely shocked and sad to hear of his death.’
For all Sinclair’s struggles, it’s no doubt a sentiment that many of the others who crossed his path will echo.
‘A crazy lord of misrule, he had no off switch’ ‘A moment of bravado that went wrong’