Health and beauty

By the book: George and Frances Osborne
By the book: George and Frances Osborne
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Making mischief

Ray King
1/ 5/2008

IT'S a small, small world. Frances Osborne, writer wife of Shadow Chancellor George, MP for Tatton, has a colourful family history.

In her new book, Frances reveals how her scandalous great-grandmother Idina Sackville became "high priestess" of Kenya's louche Happy Valley set in the 1930s.

One of Idina's five husbands was the lothario Earl of Erroll, played by Charles Dance, whose mysterious murder in 1941 was immortalised in the hit movie White Mischief.

Now the spooky bit: the family home of Sir Jock Delves-Broughton, the man widely believed to have pulled the trigger but acquitted of shooting Erroll, is just down the road from Osborne's Cheshire constituency.

The gambler and serial fraudster from Doddington Hall, near Nantwich, had married the stunningly beautiful Diana Caldwell - Greta Scacchi in the film - in November 1940.

But amid Happy Valley's alcohol and drug-fuelled wife-swapping lifestyle, Erroll and Diana became an item.

Found not guilty, Delves-Broughton, played by Joss Ackland, returned to England and took an overdose in Liverpool's Adelphi Hotel.

With skeletons like that in the cupboard, Frances' background knocks Old Etonian hubby George's membership of Oxford's notorious Bullingdon Club into a cocked top hat.


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