ANOTHER VOICE
Lord Cholmondeley and Colin Stagg have more in common than their circumstances would indicate
CHARLES MOORE
Last Sunday's Observer contained the following item towards the bottom of its News Roundup on page three:
Correction Buckingham Palace has informed us that, contrary to our report last week, the Mar- quess of Cholmondeley does not have a `grace and favour' apartment in any royal palace. We apologise for the error.
This was a modest way of referring to the original article. It took up a whole 'Focus' page. Headlined 'The Scroungers at the Top', its introductory blurb declared: The Marquess of Cholmondeley (below) inherited a £120m fortune, owns a castle (right) (what in fact appears on the right is a picture of St James's Palace], and has one of the world's finest art collections. His job is to walk backwards in front of the Queen and his wages include fat-cat 'housing benefit' of tens of thousands of pounds a year in the form of a flat. David Harrison shines the spotlight on the people really living the good life at the taxpayers' expense.
It turns out that Lord Cholmondeley has nothing in St James's Palace, but an office in St James's Place which he pays for him- self, so even if it were 'scrounging' to have a grace-and-favour residence, the Mar- quess is in the clear.
Far from 'living the good life at the tax- payers' expense', Lord Cholmondeley is at present having to pay more tax than you or I or even the editor of the Observer will ever have to produce in our entire lives. He inherited £119 million in 1990 and so will have to hand over 40 per cent of most of that. He has been grossly defamed, and one call to Buckingham Palace could have pre- vented it.
Possibly Lord Cholmondeley feels that his standing has not been damaged among those whose good opinion he values, such as the Queen in front of whom he walks backwards, and so has decided to let the matter rest. He is Lord Great Chamberlain, after all, and that, contrary to the Observ- er's suggestion, is its own reward.
Yet although Lord Cholmondeley was born with many advantages, he is really in the same boat as Mr Colin Stagg, who appears to have been born with very few. Mr Stagg is the man whose trial collapsed last week. He was accused of having mur- dered Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Com- mon on the evidence of what he told a policewoman who spent months trying to seduce him in order to get him to confess, which he never did.
Mr Stagg is the sort of person liable to be misunderstood by our vilely judgmental society. Like Lord Cholmondeley, he has reached his early thirties without marrying. He is a devotee of the pagan Wicca religion and has its symbols — masks, stags, the Cerne Abbas giant — drawn on the walls of his flat. In his loneliness, he wrote with sex- ual suggestions to women who answered advertisements in magazines.
He lives in Wimbledon, walked on the common on the morning of the murder and has a conviction for indecent exposure there. In the view of the popular newspa- pers and, apparently, of the police, all this made his an open and shut case. 'Course 'e done it. Stands to reason.'
There were bellows of rage in the tabloids when Mr Stagg's trial collapsed. The Sun said that 'the sight of Colin Stagg walking free will send a shiver down most people's spines' and that the policewoman who had tried to stir his sexual fantasies deserved a medal. And it was thought par- ticularly wicked that television companies paid for him to stay a night 'in the splen- dour of London's Waldorf Hotel'. Accord- ing to the Daily Mail, Mr Stagg 'dined in the 85-seat restaurant, spurning the esca- lope of wild salmon, butter sauce and wild rice at £15.50, and the grilled fillet of sea bass with olive oil and dill at £16.50, in favour of an equally sumptuous meat dish. [What was it, then?] His group had a bottle of red and a bottle of white from a wine list with prices up to £165.' A small compensa- tion, you might think, for being pestered by mucky letters from a policewoman and held in prison for more than a year awaiting trial. But, no, the idea of any compensation makes good British blood boil. Mr Stagg may sue for malicious prosecution, appar- ently, and the press found a lawyer who said he could collect `up to £225,000'. This figure was then compared with the money likely to be paid to Alex Hanscombe, the murdered woman's infant son, under crimi- nal injuries compensation laws. The 'sug- gested figure' is £22,000.
The usual beastly collection of Tory MPs were then invited to express outrage at these two entirely hypothetical figures. One, Mr Harry Greenway, said to the Daily Express, 'Nothing can replace a mother for a child. The boy should be compensated accordingly.' Spoken truer than he knew. Nothing can replace the mother, and so nothing should. The cases are different. No public service has wronged poor Alex Hanscombe and so none should be liable (though purely charitable assistance must surely be right). Mr Stagg, on the other hand, has been abominably treated by two public services, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, so I hope he takes them to the cleaners.
If you read a full account of the trial, Mr Stagg emerges as almost heroic. Again and again, the policewoman airs her pretended sadistic lusts and poor Mr Stagg tries politely to see her point of view: 'You said in that letter that you and that man used to enjoy upsetting and hurting people. I do not understand. Do you mean physically, mentally, or emotionally? Please explain as I live a quiet life.' A friend of mine who claims that he remained a virgin until very nearly Mr Stagg's age tells me that he would say almost anything to get women into bed. He was never unlucky enough to be faced with a woman who wanted him to confess to a murder but he thinks that if he had been he might well have humoured her. Given the depth of Mr Stagg's loneli- ness and the strength of his desire, he was very strong-minded not to have pretended he was a serial killer. His own, unprompted fantasy was pathetically innocent — dinner cooked together, with wine in the fridge, followed, as his counsel put it, by 'consen- sual sexual activity with no indecency, no sado-masochistic overtures, no anal sex and no group sex'.
Lord Cholmondeley and Mr Stagg are both victims. They are flies to the wanton boys of the press. And although it was Mr Stagg who is mocked for his unpleasant fantasies, he was more fantasised against than fantasising. A fantasy — the psycho- logical — was designed and when Mr Stagg did not fit it a fantasy world was created to persuade him to do so, the press fantasising the while about the pretty blonde policewoman and what a story it would all make when Mr Stagg was sent down. In Lord Cholmondeley's case, the press fantasy is that scores of vastly rich people who hang round the Queen sponge off the taxpayer in return for nominal duties. Amid the fumes of that fantasy, they failed to notice that Lord Cholmondeley could not be forced into the frame. It takes blunders like these to enable one to see how mad the fantasies are now becoming.
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