Earl Spencer's ex-wife at the centre of a love feud between her estranged husband and soldier lover
By Richard
Kay and Ian Evans
UPDATED:
07:39 BST, 16 April 2009
Earl
Spencer's ex-wife is embroiled in an astonishing love spat between two other
men in her life.
Victoria
Aitken, whose maiden name is Lockwood, was married to Princess Diana's brother
for eight years.
The former
model has sat on the sidelines as her estranged second husband Jonathan
Aitken -
no relation to the once-jailed former Tory Minister - has
allegedly fought over her with her new lover James Clinch, in her adopted home
city of Cape Town.
Mrs Aitken
43, parted from her second husband in the autumn after - he
claims -
she became involved with Mr Clinch, a former British soldier who lives
in South Africa.
According
to documents lodged at the High Court of South Africa in Cape Town, Mr Aitken,
a South African, has not taken the break-up well. Mr Clinch accuses Mr Aitken
of threatening to kill him.
He has
applied for a restraining order against Mr Aitken preventing him from
assaulting him, coming near his children his office and home, in Kenilworth
suburb.
The former
lieutenant in the 1st Battalion, The Queen's Regiment, alleges Mr Aitken
threatened to have him 'shot in the head'
- which Mr Aitken strenuously
denies.
In return,
Mr Aitken has launched a £75,000 (1m Rand) claim for damages against Mr Clinch
for breaking up his marriage.
Legal
documents said some of the money would compensate him for the 'loss of
affection, comfort, society and services of the said Victoria'.
Mr Aitken,
who was forced out of the family's Constantia home, still lives in the wealthy
suburb. He said in court papers: 'I detest Clinch as a human being. I have no
intention of assaulting Clinch or bringing harm to him.'
Married:
Victoria and Jonathan Aitken in 2006. Mr Aitken denies threatening to kill his
now estranged wife's new lover James Clinch
Mr Clinch
alleges Mr Aitken has admitted he was to blame for the break-up
and that he
was 'a bad husband and father'. Mr Aitken denies the claims.
To date,
there has been no police involvement in the claims and counter-claims.
Mrs Aitken
divorced Lord Spencer in 1997. They have four children. She married Mr Aitken
in 2005. They have a son. But she has started divorce proceedings.
Mr Clinch,
41, split with his wife Samantha three years ago. But Mr Aitken has befriended
her, calling on her support against his love rival.
In court
papers Mr Clinch says: 'Mrs Aitken and I are in love with each other.'
A friend of
Mrs Aitken said: 'Her relationship with Mr Clinch did not begin until after
Jonathan had moved out of the marital home and divorce proceedings had begun.
'There was
no extra-marital affair between them because her marriage was effectively
over.'
Catherine
Victoria Lockwood is the daughter of John Lockwood and Jean née Holt. On 16
September 1989, she married Charles Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, at the
Church of St Mary, Great Brington. During her first marriage she was styled as
Victoria, Viscountess Althorp, and later Victoria Spencer, Countess Spencer.
Prince Harry was a pageboy at their wedding.
Children:
Lady Kitty
Eleanor Spencer (born 28 December 1990)
Lady Eliza
Victoria Spencer (born 10 July 1992)
Lady Katya
Amelia Spencer (born 10 July 1992)
Louis
Frederick John Spencer, Viscount Althorp (born 14 March 1994); heir-apparent to
the earldom.
She
suffered from eating disorders and drug and alcohol abuse during her first
marriage. It was alleged that the earl had an extra-marital affair with a
journalist early in the marriage. The couple moved with their four children
to South Africa in 1995 to avoid the media. After their divorce on 3
December 1997, Lord Spencer moved back to the United Kingdom, and subsequently
remarried twice.
By NEIL SEARS
Last updated at 08:51 14 March 2008
She has battled with drink, drugs and eating disorders - and seen her marriage to Princess Diana's brother end in acrimonious divorce.
But at the age of 43, Victoria Spencer has never looked better.
She is pictured here with her teenage daughter Lady Kitty at their home in Cape Town.
And she looks more like an older sister than a mother of five who has had more than her share of turmoil.
Victoria married Earl Spencer in 1989, with Prince Harry as a pageboy. Kitty was born the next year, followed by twins Eliza and Amelia in 1992, and Louis in 1994.
It was only after Louis's arrival that she confronted her addictions to heroin and alcohol, and her anorexia and bulimia - having a heart tattooed on her arm to symbolise her rebirth.
But the couple's marriage collapsed after their move to South Africa and when Kitty was seven they divorced acrimoniously.
Earl Spencer has since remarried and divorced, gaining two more children in the process.
Victoria, meanwhile, has been married for three years to Jonathan Aitken - unrelated to the disgraced former Conservative cabinet minister - and has a five-year-old son, Samuel, by him.
She says that her late sister-in-law was a great support during her marital problems.
"I suppose Diana and I had quite a bit in common with our eating disorders and broken marriages, and she was compassionate."
Victoria adds that discovering six months after Kitty's birth that Earl Spencer had conducted a post-marital affair with journalist Sally Ann Lasson was "a hard and painful betrayal".
"It turned me overnight from a deeply contented, first-time mother to a hurt, scared and devastated woman."
Daughter Kitty, 17, tells Hello! magazine how her parents informed her of their divorce.
"They told me that they didn't love one another any more, but that they still loved me.
"The positives of the situation were highlighted, such as two Christmases, two birthdays and two bedrooms!"
Lady Kitty expects to return to Britain this year and live with her father at his Althorp estate in Northamptonshire before starting university in 2009.
She jokes that her background is so troubled it should feature on daytime TV.
"Sometimes I feel like my family should be on the Jerry Springer Show.
"From the outside, the structure looks so dysfunctional. However, every single member of my family is part of my happiness."
Kitty adds that the frequent criticism heaped on her father has done nothing to dent her love for him. She speaks to him daily.
"It's hurtful for any daughter to read negative things about her father, but he's someone who remains true to himself.
"I am definitely a daddy's girl. I'm more like him than my mother. We share the same sense of humour and have similar interests.
Poor little
rich girls
Emily
Hourican
July 3 2011
5:00 AM
Sun-kissed
and glamorous, they nearly stole the show at the recent royal wedding. The
Spencer girls -- Lady Kitty and her younger sisters, twins Lady Eliza and
Amelia -- are sexy, wealthy and well connected.
Despite a
dysfunctional background -- they are the elder children of the serially
unfaithful Earl Spencer and his ex-wife, former heroin addict Victoria Lockwood
-- the sophisticated trio are highly eligible, university-educated party girls.
Emily Hourican reports on the next generation of Spencer women
For all the
glories of the family name and estate, the most enduring image of Lady Diana
and Earl Spencer's childhood is one of almost Gothic loneliness and neglect.
Their mother Frances Shand Kydd left home when Charles was just three and Diana
six, running off with the heir to a wallpaper fortune. After her own mother
spoke out against Frances, the children were entrusted to their father's care
by the courts. He employed a succession of nannies, some cold and even cruel,
who banged the children's heads together when they misbehaved and withheld the
love they craved. As a result, Charles and Diana clung to each other, seeking
the consistency and companionship that was lacking from the large, empty houses
they grew up in.
It was a
childhood from which, arguably, Earl Spencer never quite recovered; that can be
seen at the root of his own acrimonious divorces and failure to sustain loving
relationships. And it is a childhood that maybe still echoes in the lives of
his own children, of whom he has six by two wives. Because although undeniably
a fond father, he has lived with none of his six children for very long past
their infancy, and neither has he always considered their well-being during his
difficult divorces.
The three
daughters from his first marriage, Lady Kitty, Amelia and Eliza, all with their
father's wide-spaced blue eyes and fair colouring, are the first to really
capture public attention. They were the sensation of the recent royal wedding,
an unexpected boon to photographers -- Diana's nieces, emerging, fully formed,
from their previously secluded South African upbringing.
Sexy and
sophisticated, with platinum tresses, perfect make-up and the pouting attitude
of cover girls, they added dash and glamour to what was a surprisingly dowdy
affair. In fact, their style was considerably more glossy beach-babe than
aristocratic understatement, clear evidence of their comparatively relaxed Cape
Town upbringing.
Twenty-year-old
Lady Kitty, who has a distinct look of Sophie Dahl in her modelling hey-day,
wore a nude-toned body-con dress by Victoria Beckham, and, in particular,
seemed to be using the wedding as a kind of social announcement, a coming-out
of sorts; although having been on the cover of Tatler two years ago, 19 years
after her mother Victoria Lockwood, and previously voted Most Eligible Girl in
Britain by the magazine, she is clearly no stranger to exposure. In fact, she
has a sophisticated instinct for publicity, as well as a willingness to blurt
out indiscretions to those beyond the family circle.
The three
Spencer girls are friends of Prince Harry more than William's, and seem well
matched to Harry's racier set; in fact, they have the same kind of
high-maintenance blonde glamour and good-time ethos as Harry's on-off
girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, who was brought up in Zimbabwe before moving to the
UK.
However,
behind the sun-kissed reflection of wealth (the family fortune is an estimated
£100m) and privilege, theirs is a story that reads sometimes as bleakly as
Charles and Diana's own, a tale of three poor little rich girls with a distinct
exhibitionist streak that might just be the legacy of a legacy; the long shadow
of Earl Spencer's miserable childhood stretching far across to the other side
of the world.
In fact,
Lady Kitty has joked that they belong in the world of daytime TV.
"Sometimes I feel like my family should be on The Jerry Springer
Show," she told Hello! Magazine in 2008, though also insisting: "From
the outside, the structure looks so dysfunctional. However, every single member
of my family is part of my happiness."
Charles
Spencer and Victoria Lockwood, a model, were married in 1989, after knowing
each other just a few months, with Prince Harry as a page boy. Kitty was born a
year later, and within six months of her birth, Earl Spencer had begun an
affair with a journalist. "It turned me overnight from a deeply contented,
first-time mother to a hurt, scared and devastated woman," Victoria later
said of the discovery that her husband was cheating with an old flame. However,
she had twins Amelia and Eliza two years later, and the son and heir Louis --
whose birth was greeted with unreconstructed whoops of triumph by the Spencer
family -- two years after that. But by the time Louis was born, the marriage
was well into injury time, with Victoria suffering from serious addictions to
heroin and alcohol, along with a pronounced eating disorder.
Victoria
went for treatment and managed to kick her destructive habits, getting a tattoo
of a heart on her right arm to symbolise her rebirth. However, she is far from
complacent about her recovery, saying a few years ago: "There are no
holidays from this illness. The price of freedom is constant vigilance. I
attend recovery meetings every week and I will do so for the rest of my
life."
It was then
the family moved to South Africa, to try to patch things up and create a more
solid domestic life, away from the camera lenses and snide headlines of the
English media. Like most such moves, though, it failed in its objectives. After
all, a physical relocation is far easier than any emotional rapprochement. The
Earl continued to philander, and in 1997 the couple divorced in a highly public
and acrimonious fashion. She accused him of sleeping with dozens of women, many
while she was in rehab, while he quipped nastily when reminded of his duty to
stick by his wife through thick and thin, that she was "thin, and
certainly thick".
Kitty was
seven at the time and the twins five; too young to realise that their parents
were playing out a vicious battle of tit-for-tat in the media, or that the
family name was the subject of much smug public jeering, but certainly old
enough to understand that their world was crashing down around them. "They
told me they didn't love one another any more, but they still loved me,"
said Kitty of that time. "The positives of the situation were highlighted,
such as two Christmases, two birthdays and two bedrooms." It's an attitude
that seems, more than anything, a brave attempt to look for the good in
something plainly devastating.
For a time,
Earl Spencer, who always said he would never entrust his children's care to
nannies after his own miserable experiences, stayed in South Africa, dating
Calvin Klein model Josie Borain. But once that ended, he returned to England,
where he married Caroline Freud, ex-wife of Matthew Freud, and had two more
children. Undoubtedly a better father than he was a husband, Spencer worked
hard at maintaining contact -- he flew to South Africa every month or so and
phoned regularly, while the children spent four holidays a year at the family
home Althorp -- but he never again lived in the same country as them, and,
despite the odd masterful intervention, his influence on their day-to-day lives
was necessarily limited.
For a
while, it looked as if the Spencer story would settle into a pleasant,
perfectly traditional groove -- wrong match followed happily by right match.
Charles seemed happy with Caroline, who was in many ways his soulmate, with
similar interests and a supportive nature, and together they forged great plans
for the modernising of Althorp and the establishment of a literary festival
there.
They bought
a house in Maida Vale -- from Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour -- and looked
to be blending their families in a modern, relaxed, successful way, eased by
plenty of money and genuine goodwill. Caroline's two boys by her marriage to
Freud were just slightly younger than Louis, and interested in the same kinds
of things, happy to kick a football around the stunning grounds at Althorp,
while Spencer's girls, Kitty, Amelia and Eliza were seemingly delighted with
their new baby half-brother.
Caroline
described her step-children as "the most delightful you could ever hope to
meet", and said they made her job easy. Had things continued in this vein,
it would have been just another unremarkable story of initial hiccup then happy
ever after. Instead, Spencer, who seems ever to scupper his own chances of
stability, filed for divorce in 2006 when his sixth and youngest child was just
four months old, and started an affair with Coleen Sullivan, a US journalist
who came to interview him for a documentary on Princess Diana.
He and Caroline
went through a divorce nearly as nasty and messy as his first, with most of the
bitterness centred around the house in London, which Caroline badly wanted to
retain. Initially, the Spencer girls are said to have sided with her, asking
that she be allowed to stay there, but the passage of time greatly altered
their allegiances, and by 2009 Lady Kitty was quoted as saying, very
indiscreetly: "She's an awful woman, I'm glad he's divorcing her," to
a journalist she met in the VIP enclosure at Wimbledon. It was Kitty who
accompanied her father to the divorce hearings in London's High Court, an
indication that he, as is so often the case with divorced men, has somehow
elevated her to the status of companion, giving her the role a wife would
normally fill. And, as is often the case for girls who have difficult,
overbearing fathers, Kitty seems to identify strongly with Earl Spencer
"It's hurtful for any daughter to read negative things about her father,
but he's someone who remains true to himself," she has said. "I am
definitely a daddy's girl. I'm more like him than my mother. We share the same
sense of humour and have similar interests."
Meanwhile,
apart from visits to England and Althorp, the girls and Louis were brought up
by Victoria in Cape Town. She, too, married again, to Jonathan Aitken, a South
African businessman who she met in rehab, and they had a son. Her other
children liked Aitken, who was charming and charismatic, but after a couple of
years he lapsed back into addiction and, in 2009, Victoria demanded a divorce,
saying his conduct was "irreconcilable with the continuation of a normal
marital relationship". She then began a romance with a former British Army
lieutenant James Clinch, much to the chagrin of Aitken, and a nasty, convoluted
domestic row broke out. Clinch filed a restraining order against Aitken, who he
claims tried to shoot him, while Aitken, who denied the allegations,
counter-claimed, suing Clinch for £250,000 for breaking up his marriage.
Meanwhile,
Charles himself remarried recently for a third time, to Canadian philanthropist
and, of course, former model Karen Gordon.
And what of
the girls and Louis in all of this? Earl Spencer stepped in, the lordly deus ex
machina, and removed them from the scene of the storm, installing them in a
luxurious mansion, supervised only by au pairs and domestic staff.
They were
also given the responsibility of managing their own money. "My father is
strict about the money he gives us," Kitty said in an interview.
"It's all worked out so we can buy petrol, pay for our car insurance,
books, accommodation and that sort of thing. I've also got a set amount of
spending money, and if I go over, then that's it." Kitty was 19 at the
time, studying politics and psychology at Cape Town University, while the twins,
17, and Louis, 15, were still at school. Eliza at the time was also recovering
from a terrible personal shock; her first serious boyfriend Christopher Elliot,
a talented body-surfer, was killed in a car accident just a few days before her
16th birthday.
And yes,
like any young people with great personal freedom and large incomes, the girls
threw themselves into partying and are regulars on the Cape Town nightclub
scene. Their Facebook pages and those of their friends carry provocative
pictures of the girls dancing, preening, striking poses that are sometimes
flirtatious, sometimes seriously raunchy, showing two fingers to the camera,
occasionally dressed like extras from a Madonna video in tight bodices and
super-short skirts.
Growing up
in South Africa has allowed them far more freedom than would have been the case
in Britain, where simply being Diana's nieces would have guaranteed them an
oppressive degree of media attention, and it is highly unlikely such photos
would exist in so accessible a forum had the girls been raised in the more
stifling atmosphere of the English aristocracy. There is a wild streak to these
three that is perfectly in keeping with the family name and, indeed, with their
mother's difficult history, but the publicising of it is still relatively
unusual for their class.
Amelia
recently got into trouble with the law after an alleged fracas outside a
fast-food restaurant. She was accused of common assault along with a male
friend after claims that she "swore at, smacked and kicked" a man on
crutches. But just in time for the royal wedding, she was cleared of all
charges.
And the
partying, though exuberant, is also relatively innocent; after all, the girls
have their mother as an example of what not to do. Victoria, who has been clean
for many years now, has done her work well. "I would never touch drugs --
we saw what she used to be like," Kitty told Tatler some years ago.
"But she's cool, she's not over-protective. She doesn't drill into us
'don't touch drugs'. She's just brought us up so that we don't want to, rather
than we can't."
And,
despite all the partying, the twins did well enough in their final exams to get
into university -- Eliza to Varsity College and Amelia the University of Cape
Town. Kitty, meanwhile, has graduated and is turning her attention to designing
her own range of casual wear.
"I'm
sick of being compared to other people and I just want to achieve stuff in my
own right, for my self-worth and self-respect," she said recently. She has
been talking about a move to the UK for years, to be close to her father and
exploit the many opportunities open to her since appearing as Tatler's Most
Eligible Girl in Britain in 2007. Following the bombshell of her recent royal
wedding appearance, and given the media appetite for all things upper class,
now would seem to be a very good time. But whether Kitty can turn the media
fascination into commercial success, or is destined to play out the same kind
of role -- aristocrat in public meltdown, basically -- as her father and aunt,
remains to be seen.
Sunday Indo Living
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