Sweet surprise for Snowdon’s secret daughter, Polly

EVERY family has its secrets. Few, though, can match the disorientating truth which remained unknown to Polly Fry until she was 45: that her father was not, in fact, Jeremy Fry, inventor and scion of the Fry chocolate empire — but Fry’s great friend, Princess Margaret’s former husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon.

But now Polly has a secret that she is only too happy to share. I can reveal that, seven years after writing of her hopes of finding ‘a Mr Darcy’, she has found him – in the form of legendary ‘reputation manager’ Abel Hadden.

Hadden, whose clients have included the Sultan of Brunei, confirms that he and Polly (pictured) are very happily entangled. ‘Yes, it’s true. We’ve known each other for about 18 months,’ he tells me.

But that’s not all. ‘We’re planning a summer wedding,’ adds Hadden who, like his fiancee, is in his 60s.

‘I proposed between Christmas and New Year in Cornwall. We are absolutely thrilled.’

Friends and family will feel that a new and happier chapter in Polly’s life is no more than she deserves. After her mother Camilla’s death, and aware of ‘endless rumours’ — and after ‘years staring at myself in the mirror and then at photographs of the two possible candidates for the role of my father’ — she decided to discover the truth.

She persuaded Lord Snowdon to join her in taking a DNA test. The rumours were true: Polly, born while Snowdon was still on honeymoon with Queen Elizabeth’s sister, was indeed his daughter.

He invited her to call him ‘Pops’, while publicly denying paternity.

Only in 2008, three years after Jeremy Fry’s death, did he finally acknowledge that he was Polly’s father. Yet Polly was unmentioned in Snowdon’s will in 2017.

By contrast, he left £250,000 to his son, Jasper, fathered out of wedlock, as a result of his affair with journalist Melanie Cable-Alexander.

Polly, whose husband, businessman Barnaby Higson, had by then left her for what she described as ‘pastures new’, attended Snowdon’s memorial service nevertheless. There will be no shortage of family when she marries this summer. Hadden, whose first wife was Belinda, daughter of Tory MP Sir Reginald Bennett, points out: ‘We have nine children and 12 grandchildren between us.’