Beyond our Ken

Such a strange title, the kind we’d expect on a self-help book. An afterthought by publishers who feared many – even fellow journalists – would not have heard of Kenneth Rose? For 36 years, since its launch in 1961, he composed for The Sunday Telegraph a diary column called Albany, which he’d named after a set of swish apartments in Piccadilly. He was fired (by letter) in 1997 by the paper’s then editor, Dominic Lawson.

Kenneth notes in his diary: “He offered me an ex-gratia payment of £25,000, as much space as I want for a valedictory article and the hope that I shall contribute articles in future to the paper. He also makes flattering remarks about my work.”

Disappointingly, these remarks are not repeated, but the editor of the diaries, DR Thorpe, tells us in his preface that Kenneth “numbered among his close associates” the leading diplomats and ambassadors of the day. “He also cultivated cabinet ministers, bishops and senior members of the armed forces, such as Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.” Thorpe points out: “Kenneth was not a mere fair-weather friend, but he was especially supportive to those who fell into difficulties, notably Jeremy Thorpe and Jonathan Aitken.” And Sarah, Duchess of York – aka Fergie – “to whom he wrote his last letter”.

Thorpe says Kenneth confessed: “I find it difficult to let a good story pass me by.” When an acquaintance disparaged gossip, he counselled: “The cobbler must not criticise leather.” Yet I think it is fair to say that the Albany column was not distinguished by its plenitude of good gossip stories. Seemingly saving his plums for his diaries, not Albany. It was suspected that Kenneth passed on some of the scandalous stories he heard to rival newspapers. From time to time, he’d ring up the Daily Express’s William Hickey. A previous Hickey ventriloquist tells me: “He’d say ‘something which might amuse you…’.”

In 1983, Kenneth is introduced to the painter Lucian Freud. “He told us that when he received the insignia of the CH from the Queen he felt some resentment against the courtiers, who in supposedly putting him at his ease managed to be both patronising and irritating.” Kenneth notes: “I find it extraordinary that he should entrust me with these confidences.”

Presumably Freud and others felt confident Kenneth would not repeat them in The Sunday Telegraph.

When, in 1983, he attended a party given by the Most Revd Bruno Heim, the Vatican’s first Apostolic Nuncio to Britain, he finds “the comedian Jimmy Savile is there, wearing a tracksuit with a papal medal round his neck, accompanied by his agent and his photographer, and determined to squeeze every drop of publicity out of it. So he talks to nuns and to someone in a wheelchair immediately in front of where Bruno is receiving his guests. I am glad to say that most people turn their backs on this nauseating spectacle”.

In 1985, Kenneth talks to Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames, noting in his diary that the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson claimed the Soames family still had the Graham Sutherland portrait of Churchill which they said they had destroyed. The implication was that they were defrauding the Treasury by concealing an asset of Winston’s estate on which they should have paid death duties. Kenneth writes: “Mary bearded Wilson on this, and even gave him, as a sign of good faith, the name of the odd-job man who carried out the actual burning.” A great story. A pity he didn’t share it with his Albany readers.

Attending the funeral of the Duchess of Windsor in 1986, Kenneth inquires of the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie “when he last attended the funeral of a person whose name was nowhere mentioned from beginning to end”. Runcie replies: “No, never.” Kenneth concludes that it had “all the grandeur and pageantry of a royal funeral, yet with a cold heartlessness”. On another occasion, Runcie tells Kenneth a story “he has been saving for me”. At the Duchess’s funeral, one of the wreaths carried a message saying: “You would have made a swell Queen.” However, “a guardsman was summoned with a pair of clippers to remove it”.

The former Tory minister Tony Lambton telephones Kenneth from Italy, inviting him to stay, and to share a story about Lord Mountbatten, recently murdered by the IRA. For weeks before it happened, he could not get any of the local boatmen to take him out – “they must have heard that something was being plotted against him,” concludes Lambton. I don’t remember this being reported at the time. Did Kenneth mention it to his Telegraph employers?

In 1993, the courtier Martin Charteris tells Kenneth: “If the Queen had taken as much trouble with the blood lines of her sons’ wives as she has over her horses and dogs, she would have avoided a lot of trouble.” As it happens, Kenneth is later introduced to Diana by the Tory MP and royal confidant Norman St John-Stevas. She says: “Ah yes, you used to come down to Althorp.” Kenneth notes: “We chat about those times, and how Barbara Cartland’s false eyelashes once fell into Prince Eddie’s [Duke of Kent] soup during a shooting lunch… Princess Diana could not possibly have been more friendly.” Perhaps she’d heard the old rascal was keeping a diary?

In March 1994, Kenneth gives a hint about his modus operandi: “Charles Guthrie (who was to become Chief of the General Staff) telephones this morning and we discuss what I can usefully write in my column on Sunday…”

In September 1994, Kenneth (accompanied by the royal biographer Hugo Vickers) motors to Sunningdale to see the Duchess of York: “Fergie has both sides of her correspondence with Andrew…she also has the letters written to her by the Queen.” She adds: “I also have Prince Philip’s letters, telling me I have let down the firm. In one of them he wrote that he had been reading a book about Edwina Mountbatten, and that my conduct reminded him of hers.” Might the possession of such valuable correspondence be why Her Fergieness retains her royal ties?

In March 1997, Kenneth receives his CBE from Prince Charles. “The Prince beams and says, ‘Well done, Kenneth.’ I tell him I’m lunching with the Queen Mother afterwards.” Of course he was! The QM (as he calls her) is the subject of more favourable coverage in Kenneth’s diaries than her daughter. Why might this be? Perhaps because she gave him the time of day, while her daughter withheld his “K”.