PIG IGNORANT ... and so are all the rest of us!
Divorcing duchess who says her ex’s very posh pals are...
More people will listen to a duchess than a plain Tracy
WIT Hits 40 bedrooms, grand state rooms, priceless artworks including a pair of Canalettos, and 52,000-acre estate, the Grade I listed Badminton House in Gloucestershire is truly a home fit for an aristocrat.
So it might seem something of a surprise that the new Duchess of Beaufort is unlikely to spend much time in its magnificent halls or corridors. Indeed, actress and campaigner Tracy Worcester, who gained the title last August, has never seen herself as a future chatelaine of what is surely one of Britain’s grandest country houses. And this is just as well, perhaps.
For Tracy, a committed Corbynista in a high-vis cycling jacket, is Britain’s least likely duchess, a woman who nurtures uncompromising views on farming and animal welfare, who once ‘invaded’ a pig farm on behalf of The Mail on Sunday, and who thinks little of raising hackles at country-house dinner tables with her refreshingly pungent views.
Showing little enthusiasm for her new title, she says simply that she’s only calling herself a duchess to further her continuing attempt to overthrow an ‘alliance of big business, government and the banks’.
‘ I had planned to remain Tracy Worcester,’ she says. ‘But more people are going to be interested in the campaigning voice of a duchess than a Tracy – so I’ll use it for that.’
It is a complicated situation made all t he more confusing because there will soon be another Duchess of Beaufort on the scene.
Tracy has recently separated from Henry Somerset, 65, her husband of 30 years, the ebullient, larger-than-life 12 th Duke. Better known as Harry ‘Bunter’ Beaufort, he is a voracious Tweeter who plays in a rock group, and boasts a £315 million fortune.
Harry in turn, announced at a recent hunt ball that he would soon be marrying Georgia Powell, a 48- year- old former journalist – who will become the chatelaine of Badminton, while Tracy will continue to live in an 18th Century stone house on the estate. Despite having ten bedrooms and en suite bathrooms, it is called The Cottage.
‘Badminton is magnificent but I never saw myself moving in,’ insists Tracy, 59, whose divorce is currently going through. ‘Before Harry inherited the dukedom last August, we used to go up to lunch and that was quite enough for me.
‘Frankly, I don’t think I would have been very good at it. It would be very hard to stop me banging on about our flawed economy to guests who just want to enjoy their dinner.’
She would rather be discussing the true love of her life, which is pigs – along with the folly of an elite she believes is addicted to cruel factory farming at the expense of small farms and animal welfare. ‘For all the sadness at the break-up of my family, it gives me more time and freedom to do what I want, which is campaign, make films and bring people together to rebuild a healthy planet,’ she says. ‘Though the settlement has taken its time to negotiate, it’s been entirely amicable.’
Fiercely private, this is a rare interview about her personal life. ‘I would
never have ended the marriage, but it has been important to us to divorce peaceably for our children, friends and local community,’ she says, diplomatically. ‘We are now very happy in our new lives. I like Georgia a lot. She’s fun and intelligent, perfect for Harry.’
In any case, pigs are far more important than the social pecking order, as she makes very clear. Tracy is a committed environmental activist with a political viewpoint falling somewhere between Jeremy Corbyn and the radical wing of the Green Party.
Two years ago she fearlessly clambered over the fences of a British farm in the dead of night for an investigation into the shocking conditions of modern pig farming. She admits her agenda does, sometimes, make friends uncomfortable and she is clear that it is men – husbands in particular – who bear the lion’s share of the blame.
‘I find it’s the wives who see the urgency to protect our fragile planet, resolve conflicts peacefully, treat animals humanely and eat healthy food. It’s the husbands who fear that change in the corporate system will damage the economy they are benefiting from.’
One friend warned her that if she voted for Corbyn, her property values would go down.
Tracy bit back: ‘I told her that if I really cared about the value of property and my assets instead of the wellbeing of people and this planet, then I would still be married to Harry Worcester.’
To spread her message, she makes films for social media and fundraises with celebrity supporters such as Zac and Ben Goldsmith, actor Dominic West, model Jasmine Guinness and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason.
‘Everybody loves pigs,’ she says, warming to her theme, ‘but most of us are pig ignorant about the fact that 75 per cent of pork eaten in the UK comes from pigs raised in animal factories in the UK, Europe and elsewhere where they suffer horrendous overcrowding, stress and disease, biting each other’s tails off in desperation and gnawing on the steel bars until their mouths bleed. Just to keep them alive they need routine doses of antibiotic, which causes superbugs that pass to humans.’
It all seems a long way from 1987, when glamorous actress Tracy Ward, granddaughter of the Earl of Dudley, married Harry – then the Marquess of Worcester – in the society wedding of the year.
Tracy abandoned her showbusiness career to bring up her three children – and then began volunteering for Friends of the Earth. She joined anti-war protest marches, lobbied politicians, made speeches for the environmental movement and films for BBC World. Her new passion didn’t always make her marriage easy. Harry is a gregarious, live-it-large personality – with a rock band on the side – who never shared her views. So how did her marriage last so long?
‘I believe in keeping a family unit together as much as I believe in sustainability and a healthy soil,’ she says, a curious mixture of revolutionary and traditional conservative. ‘And while Harry and I did not believe in the same things, we were a good team. He is funny, charming and intelligent while I was the serious one banging on about social and environmental justice.’
Harry succeeded to the dukedom on the death of his father, the 11th Duke, last year ( a death t hat l eaves hi s widow, Miranda, as a third Duchess of Beaufort). Until then Harry and Tracy had been the Marquess and Marchioness of Worcester.
While their divorce is so amicable the Duke delivers organic Badminton estate vegetables to her door every Wednesday, she is now happily settled with fellow filmmaker Alastair Kenneil, who is a co-director of her campaign Farms Not Factories, which aims to persuade us to buy high-welfare meat and phase out factory farming.
No mere, dilettante, her 2009 documentary Pig Business proved her credentials by exposing the allegedly appalling conditions in which pigs, some destined for the UK market, were raised by Smithfield Foods, the biggest pork producer in the world, although the company denied claims of mistreatment and said that the film contained inaccuracies.
She lives on a diet of green tea and vegetables and barely touches alcohol yet, with a sharp, self-deprecating wit, is anything but worthy. Tracy swears like a trooper.
‘I may not have as much access to powerful people, but I am freer to be outspoken,’ she says, contemplating her change in status.
Perhaps that’s why her latest campaign, Not A Happy Sausage, is a series of outrageous short films that have offended some in the environmental movement.
‘I am not interested in preaching to the converted. Time is running out to change things for the better. And I would not want to be called “Your Grace”. It just isn’t me.’
On that, at least, even her fiercest critics would probably agree.
75 per cent of pigs eaten in the UK come from factories