11th January 1998

From bouquets to brickbats

When Charles Spencer was a little boy of three, he lay in bed at night, ac cording to his sister Diana, sobbing: "I want my mummy, I want my mummy" - his mother having lost custody of him in the ruins of her marriage.

Sparing his three-year-old son, Louis, similar bewilderment and pain, he seemed doomed, till the last week of November, to re-enact his parents' bitter story in a divorce battle with his own wife, Victoria.

As the family poison coursed through the courts once again, Louis and his three older sisters, lived with mummy in her spacious colonial bungalow during the week, and a few miles away, at daddy's thatch-roofed villa, at weekends.

On December 1st, lawyers for the couple made a midnight announcement. "For the greater part of the three years which we have separated, we have had an amicable relationship. This has primarily been for the sake of our children," read their settlement statement. "For that same reason, we now aim to rebuild a civilised and friendly arrangement, whereby our four children will continue to prosper.

"For this reason, too, we unreservedly withdraw all allegations made in relation to each other. We recognise that we have both contributed to the breakdown of our marriage. We now intend to look to the future, and our main motive is the welfare of our four young children." The earl and countess were formally divorced on December 3.

The battle is over, but the stink lingers. As the children will one day learn, the public battle between mummy and daddy was every bit as awful as granny's and grandpa's was 30 years earlier.

The stories told in the Cape Town high court - where Victoria Spencer ambushed her husband with accusations of 12 affairs - suggested there was something about the Spencer genes that brought out the worst in a man.

Who else would live the adulterous life the 9th Earl Spencer is alleged to have led since his marriage eight years ago - and then choose to relive it in open court in front of the hostile news media? There have been few public falls from grace more abrupt than that of this podgy aristocrat who, barely three months ago at his sister's funeral, fiercely admonished the press and the royal family with a toss of his sandy curls - and was hugely applauded for doing so.

The court proceeding bared him as a man whose claim to the ethical high ground was every bit as dubious as that of the press he had accused of being at the "opposite end of the moral spectrum" to his sister. He is now exposed not just as an adulterer but as one so lacking in charm and grace that his former South African mistress took his wife's side in ambushing him in court. No wonder reporters were pulled off the Winnie Mandela murder tribunal in Johannesberg to cover the even more sensational events in Cape Town. No wonder Britain's ITN flew in a war correspondent from the Middle East.

If Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles allowed themselves a few chuckles over the TV news those past few evenings, Spencer had only himself, and his genes, to blame.

Charles Spencer's own domestic tragi-comedy began early in the summer of 1989, when the tall Viscount Althorp as he then was - met a tiny, almost emaciated model called Victoria Lockwood. He was 25 and had a reputation as a Hooray Henry; she was 24 and had been both anorexic and addicted to drugs. Hardly a perfect couple, but, in the way that young men with unhappy backgrounds do, 'Champagne Charlie' felt bewitched, and only five weeks later proposed marriage - on bended knee, by his own account.

The wedding was a royal affair. The groom was, after all, the godson of the Queen; the brother-in-law of her private secretary, Robert Fellowes; and the brother of the Princess of Wales. Despite the royal glamour, however, there was a pall over the proceedings partly because of the rain, which left the bride's silk and mink wedding dress obviously soggy, and partly because her past showed in her face.

Superficially she was a Vogue cover girl, the beautiful middle-class daughter of a former RAF officer. Intrigued by her fragile appearance, however, newspapers had unearthed stories of her activities while working as a model in New York. She was said to have gone around with gay men, and binged on food and alcohol.

What the newspapers also knew, but did not publish, was that she had been a drug addict. This was acknowledged in court by her South African lawyer, Jeremy Gauntlett.

Gauntlett said that before the marriage she told Spencer "everything about the drugs and eating disorder. She gave up drugs before she married him, and she has never resorted to drugs since."

Despite producing four children, the marriage was, by common consent, a disaster. Within six months of the wedding, Spencer was having an affair with a writer called Sally Ann Lasson. Lasson was angry when he dumped her and, just after the birth of his first daughter, Spencer heard she had sold the story to the News of the World. Attempting to spike her guns, he called the Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster with a pre-emptive confession. The affair had happened during "an extremely messy patch" when he believed his marriage was over, Spencer said. A weekend with Lasson at the Hotel Balzac in Paris had 'sickened' him, he claimed, and he had returned, determined to save his marriage.

The 'confession' was a mistake on two counts. First, all the other tabloid newspapers promptly picked up Dempster's 'scoop' and trumpeted it. Second, the News of the World had been having doubts about Lasson's story - and might not have published it. Thanks to his unwonted corroboration, it cheerfully ran five pages.

He said at the time of his confession that telling the truth had strengthened his marriage and that he and his wife were "deeply in love". In fact, as Gauntlett told the court, the "public scandal... triggered a period of enormous and deep unhappiness".

Tensions were exacerbated in 1992, when the eighth earl died, aged 68, and the Spencers had to move from their house in the grounds of the 8,500-acre Althorp estate into the 121-room mansion. With its annual running costs of £500,000, managing the estate became Spencer's full-time job. The marriage was also put under intolerable pressure over constant comment about his friendship with convicted fraudster, Darius Guppy.

Sporadic reconciliations resulted in twin daughters, Eliza and Katya, in 1992 and the birth of Louis, the long-awaited heir, in March 1994. Louis's arrival triggered a rerun of Spencer's own birth in 1964, when his father had been desperate for an heir after three daughters, the last of them Diana.

Thirty years later, Charles Spencer called in his wife, while he was in the bath, and told her callously that their marriage was over and that 'he did not love me any more,' according to an affidavit she made to the South African Court.

In this affidavit, she described how the marriage crumbled. It included 'periods of great happiness' but was marred by fights and drinking binges. "He is an extremely domineering man and I was never allowed an opinion or a voice," she said "He increasingly criticised, undermined, bullied and belittled me until, eventually I lost all confidence and became very scared of him."

In the court, though, she was confident. It was, partly, because the most extraordinary figure in the story, Chantal Collopy, her husband's former mistress had come to court with her.

Spencer met Collopy, a South African socialite, in the spring of 1994, at the 40th birthday of his friend Allan Lamb, the England cricketer. At the time, she was married with two children. He telephoned her frequently after she returned to South Alrica and, in early 1995, he spent two weeks with her there in a rented house.

Afterwards, he wrote her a love letter that was produced in court - the most devastating item in Victoria Spencer's arsenal of surprises. (See box).

When Spencer announced, publicly, at last that the marriage was over, his wife moved with the children to a smaller, but pretty, bungalow in the same district.

He did not stay full-time in South Africa, and the relationship with Collopy broke up, after she came to England to spend last Christmas with him at Althorp, where, she says, "I became suspicious that he was having an affair with someone else".

After she had returned to South Africa, he telephoned and "just told me it was all over", Collopy is quoted as telling an interviewer. She said: "I was devastated. I was very much in love with him and my own marriage was over."

Seeking revenge, she contacted Victoria Spencer. The earl, of course, knew nothing of this until hit by the vengeful blast. He might have escaped this if he had not made yet another appalling tactical mistake. Having initially agreed with his wife that the divorce should be settled quietly in London, where only the barest details can be reported, he said he wanted the matter decided in South Africa. His argument was that the South African press would pay little attention, and his children would be protected from scurrilous reporting. In fact, unfettered by South African restrictions, the British media was so enthralled that the story played back all over the South African press. - London Times

The bombshell love letter

Spencer's love missive to Chantal Collopy, produced in court, was a devastating piece of evidence. Some excerpts: "It sounds selfish, but you are everything I need. You make me feel loved and valued, an equal yet ultimately greater man, and you make me laugh, make me happy.

"There have been good times but the bad ones have been chillingly awful. I'm not sure whether Victoria can remember them all, but I can, and I never want to go through such desperate lows again.

"Part of the problem was having an immature wife, one who is incapable of dealing with a husband with a strong character, except by going on a hunger strike, an alcohol binge or resorting to drugs.

He predicted that "when I end this marriage... Victoria will collapse", and added, fatally: "I feel a dreadful bully towards Victoria".

Discussing his plans to marry Collopy after they were both divorced, he hoped, in vain it has turned out, that "these divorces will be more civilised than that of my parents. If I can't learn from their mistakes by avoiding divorce, I can at least prevent the unpleasantness that accompanied it".

Return to the Plus contents page

Read Letters to the Editor