THE Duke of Edinburgh agreed to join a royal visit to
Russia in the early 1960s despite his concerns that "the
bastards had murdered half his family", files released
yesterday disclose.
Although relations between East and West were strained
at the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin was anxious
for a State visit by the British monarchy. The proposed
trip was suggested by Captain Henry Kerby, a Tory MP,
who wrote to Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, after
meeting the Duke. Captain Kerby wrote:
"Characteristically, the Prince said at once that he would
like to go to Russia very much, although the bastards had
murdered half his family."
The papers also show that the Queen later approved a
bizarre proposal in 1967 to send Princess Margaret and
her husband, the Earl of Snowdon, to Russia on a visit as
part of a secret plan to persuade Moscow to release a
British "spy" from prison.
The suggestion came at a time when Russia was
demanding a spy deal, the release of two convicted
Russian agents, Peter and Helen Kroger, sentenced in
Britain to 20 years, in exchange for Gerald Brooke, a
British lecturer who had been caught distributing
anti-Soviet literature in Moscow on behalf of an extreme
Russian emigré organisation.
Wilson refused to consider an exchange because Brooke,
sentenced to five years, four of them in a labour camp,
was not a spy.
However, when Moscow began saying that Brooke
would be put back on trial facing more serious espionage
charges, the Government began to think urgently of ways
of preventing a second trial.
It was thought that a royal visit might get things moving.
Princess Margaret said she was prepared to go.
However, it was eventually ruled to be an "unwise" move
and the Princess never went. In the end, an exchange was
fixed which resulted in the release of Brooke in July 1969
and of the Krogers three months later.
~*~
Stripper in royal sex trap is sentenced(Electronic Telegraph)
>
By Patrick Bishop in Paris
A FORMER stripper and two accomplices were given suspended jail
sentences yesterday for an entrapment conspiracy that wrecked Princess
Stephanie of Monaco's marriage.
Muriel Moll-Houteman, from Belgium, Stephane de Lisiecki, a photographer,
and his assistant, Yves Hoogewys, had been found guilty of breaching French
privacy laws when they enticed the princess's husband, Daniel Ducruet, to a
villa in the South of France in 1996. Pictures of M Ducruet cavorting with Ms
Moll-Houteman were sent around the world and the princess, who has a son,
seven, and daughter, six, began divorce proceedings.
M Ducruet claimed that he was given spiked champagne, the court in Nice
was told. Moll-Houteman and Hoogewys received six-month suspended
sentences and the photographer, a year.
~*~
Punter's bet is on Queen Mother(UK Times)
BY ALAN HAMILTON
A WEST Country betting man stands to win £20,000 if
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother appears at Sandown
on Saturday, as she has done regularly for 30 years, to
present the Whitbread Gold Cup to the winning trainer of
the top-class steeplechase.
Eight years ago David Whitbread, landlord of the
Keyberry Hotel in Newton Abbot, Devon, watching the
race on television, placed £200 at odds of 250-1 with a
bookmaker friend that the Queen Mother would still be
presenting the trophy when 100. The bet was later
adjusted to cover the Queen Mother's 100th year, and
David Lightfoot, the bookmaker, agreed to honour the bet
up to £20,000.
The Queen Mother will reach her 100th birthday on
August 4. On Sunday she attended an Easter Day service
at St George's Chapel, Windsor, appearing well despite
walking with the aid of a stick. Clarence House could not
confirm whether she would be at Sandown.
~*~
Royal bottle breaks with sea
tradition (Uk Times)
BY ALAN HAMILTON
SUPERSTITION rules the waves, and the flinging of
champagne over the bows of a new ship is an offering to
appease angry gods. The fact that the bottle released by
the Princess Royal yesterday did not break, but fell limply
and whole into the sea, was seen not as an ill omen, but
simply as a sign that even a princess is fallible.
The Princess had become godmother to P&O's latest
vessel, Aurora, a seagoing holiday resort of 76,152
tonnes with enough balconies for 406 Romeos to
serenade their Juliets. Experts declared last night that the
resilience of the bottle had something to do with the
bottles' strength these days. "It worked all right at
rehearsals. I've never heard of a bottle failing to break
being seen as bad luck," a senior P&O official said.
Costumed children from 14 countries at which P&O calls
danced on the Southampton quayside as the Princess
swung the unexpectedly stubborn magnum on to £200
million worth of German-built steel, to the accompaniment
of the bands of the Royal Marines and Scots Guards.The
Princess and her husband, Commodore Tim Laurence,
stepped off the ship for the naming ceremony fresh from
her maiden cruise. Admittedly it was only down the Solent
and back, an overnight junket that allowed the Princess
and 900 guests to inspect the ship and enjoy a celebration
dinner on board.
During the cruise the Princess presented Captain Steve
Burgoine - like Horatio Nelson, a Norfolk man - with a
picture of a much earlier P&O ship, the Medina, which
carried her great-grandfather, George V, to the Delhi
Durbar after his coronation in 1911. The Princess in return
received a silver model of Aurora from P&O's chairman,
Lord Sterling of Plaistow.
The Right Rev Alan Smithson, Suffragan Bishop of
Jarrow, who heads the pastoral care committee of the
Mission to Seafarers, of which the Princess is patron,
blessed the vessel at her Southampton home berth and
prayed for all who sail in her.
Aurora will begin British-based cruising duty from
Southampton on May 1, next Monday. She is the newest
arrival in a market which is growing faster than any other
sector of the holiday industry, at 20 per cent a year. In
1998, no fewer than 630,000 Britons took an ocean
cruise, and the numbers continue to rise.
The cruiser is the biggest of the four vessels plying for
P&O out of Britain, and outguns by some 10,000 tonnes
the Cunard flagship Queen Elizabeth II. But she is a
tiddler compared with some of her sisters; Princess
Cruises, P&O's American-based arm, offers the Grand
Princess at 109,000 tonnes, while Royal Caribbean
boasts the behemoth Voyager of the Seas, at 142,000
tonnnes the largest passenger ship afloat.
Still, Aurora puts many a hotel in the shade with her five
lounges, 12 bars, five restaurants, three swimming pools,
theatre, concert hall and cinema, and 3,600 specially
commissioned works from mainly British artists.
A previous Aurora sailed into St Petersburg in 1917 and
fired a blank shot in the direction of the Winter Palace to
signal the start of the October Revolution. The loudest
popping in the new Aurora is likely to be that of corks.