Lewis Jones

Adored friends

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs.

issue 28 November 2009

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs.

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. In conversation he was full of amusing scandal, but the transcript of his dictated reminiscences was painfully discreet. I suggested they might be ‘sexed up’ — a new, comparatively innocent but still obviously vulgar expression — and he looked puzzled. ‘The first boy I met at Eton was my cousin Bingham,’ the transcript read, ‘who was very stupid and rather dirty, and came to a bad end.’ Bingham became Lord Lucan, so if there were more about his stupidity and dirtiness, along the lines of ‘I remember “Lucky” in Uganda, beneath a pile of oiled Nubians…’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you mean an exposé. I don’t think so.’

The 7th Earl of Lucan was a friend of Annabel Goldsmith’s, and of both her husbands.

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