Mark Thatcher.
Ex-Harrovian, ex racing driver and Texan resident now runs a consultancy company in Dallas called Grantham—a homage to his mother Maggie’s home town. The consultancy’s interests include an ostrich farm and two security companies. Maggie’s decision to request a baronetcy for Denis was seem by many as a method of paving Mark’s future for him.
And those ‘ many’ were probably right. Most journalists ( and not just journalists ) visibly bridle when they are obliged to use Mark Thatcher’s, totally unearned aristocratic arrested at his home in Constantia, Cape Town ( see Darius Guppy in previous Jot) title. Since 1992 he has been on the front pages for all the wrong reasons. In 2004 he was and charged with contravening two sections of the country’s Foreign Military Assistance Act which bans South African residents from any foreign military activity. Ultimately, in a plea-bargaining arrangement, Thatcher pleaded guilty to being involved in setting up a coup. He was fined R3m and given a four-year suspended prison sentence. As a result of this conviction he was refused entry to the U.S. and Switzerland and told to leave Monaco, where he had been holed up.
Trinny Woodall
Pencil-thin Trinny is the ex-girlfriend of Constantine Niarchos. She is a perennially glamorous, vivacious girl-about-town who is said to make men faint with desire.
Still slimmish, still ( at 58) glamorous. Not sure she still makes men ‘ faint with desire ‘, but perhaps she doesn’t need to make rich men want her as she is a lot richer than shewas in 1992 thanks to her almost overnight success on TV as the co-host ( with Susannah Constantine) of ‘What Not to Wear ‘, which ran from 2002 to 2005. She subsequently co-wrote a number of best seller spin offs from the programme. She seems to have inherited business acumen from her father, a banker, and her grandfather, Sir John Duncanson, who was head honcho of the British Iron and Steel Federation.
Julie Burchill
Joined the NME as a teenager. At the age of 31 she was earning $110,000 a year for airing her controversial views each week with the Mail on Sunday. She has written several collections of essays and a bestselling novel, Ambition, which is now being made into a film. Has a son, Bobby Kennedy, by first husband journalist Tony Parsons, and another by second husband, journalist Cosmo Landesman. She communicates only by fax.
Burchill is not the loud mouth contrarian she once was, but she still enjoys annoying people. She has swapped her beloved fax for social media, where her outspoken views
on the Irish, her defence of Israel and opposition to Wokeness and cancel culture have got her into trouble. Her defamatory remarks aimed at Palestine journalist Ash Sarkar
resulted in a costly libel suit which was settled out of court, Burchill offering a 600 word ‘ unreserved ‘ apology and agreeing to pay substantial damages. As a consequence
of this legal action Burchill’s book on Wokeness and cancel culture was itself cancelled by her publisher, though the book was published elsewhere. Burchill’s broad
Bristolian accent is rarely aired today on TV or radio.
Imran Khan
The most famous of Pakistan’s cricketers, he has now retired for the second time. Although he is often to be seen at Tramp he is also busily raising money for his
cancer hospital in Pakistan.
Today Tramp would be not a good place to find this superb cricketing all- rounder .When he left the game many thought his commitment to the future of Pakistan
would end with him becoming Prime Minister, and so it transpired. He served in this capacity from 2018 – 2022.
Bill Buford
Editor of Granta, a failed student magazine which he took over in 1979 and turned into a groovy and prestigious literary quarterly which has become a forum for modern
writing and has an international circulation of about 100,000.
Buford left Granta in 1995 to take up a position as fiction editor of the New Yorker. His well received Among the Thugs, which took the lid off the world of football
hooliganism, was followed by two further exposes of his life as a ‘kitchen slave’ in Italy and as a trainee chef in Lyon.
Jade Jagger
Jade and her boyfriend, Piers Jackson, 22 ( the father of their daughter Assisi) both paint at their home in Somerset. Their works were recently exhibited and
sold for more than £2,000.
Jade had studied painting in Florence and she continues to exhibit, but not with Jackson, who she ditched in 1999. Today at 50 she is a glamorous grandmother, which
makes Mick Jagger a great grandfather ( imagine that!). Jade now has a thriving jewellery and fashion business.
Antony Worrall Thompson
An ex-Rugby player, rotund and ginger-haired, Antony sprang to fame with Menage a Trois, a restaurant in Beauchamp Place frequented by the Princess of Wales. He owns
Bistro190 and dell Ugo and is said to be the man who reinvented French country food.
Today he is among the multitude of ‘ celebrity ‘ chefs who regularly appear on TV cookery shows. Perhaps he and former professional footballer, Gordon’ Kitchen
Nightmare’ Ramsey swap sporting anecdotes, but I doubt it somehow. In 2012 Worrall Thompson was caught shoplifting cheese and wine in Henley-on- Thames. More
recently, in a magazine interview, he suggested that the leaves of Henbane might make a tasty addition to salads. Of course, he meant to say Fat Hen, which is a common
wild plant. Henbane ( hyocyamus niger) , though much rarer, can be dangerously poisonous, as it yields three powerful sedatives, including scopolamine and atropine, which in high doses can cause death.
Michael Ignatieff
Archetypal self-styled Nineties polyglot and ubiquitous TV presenter. Toronto-born, part Russian, his grandfather was Education ministering the last Tsarist cabinet before the Revolution.
After 1992 Ignatieff pursued an academic career as a history professor in Canada, ending up publishing seven learned tomes on philosophy and politics. He also became
leader of the country’s Liberal party.
To be continued…
{RR)