Supposedly synonymous with fair play and gentlemanly conduct, the MCC was painfully embarrassed last summer when scores of its members were caught on camera subjecting Australian batsmen to volleys of abuse on the final day of the Lord’s Test.
The club’s committee subsequently expelled one miscreant and suspended two others but, if it thought its difficulties were behind it, it has been forced to think again after being bowled a bouncer by disaffected traditionalists nauseated both by what they see as the committee’s obsession with political correctness and by its autocratic manner.
For I can disclose that no fewer than 180 MCC rebels have forced the club to prepare for a Special General Meeting at which there will be a vote to introduce a ‘fully democratic process’ when selecting a successor to the club’s chairman.
The incumbent, banker Bruce Carnegie-Brown, announced in November that he would not seek a second term. It was a wise decision, critics say, given that Carnegie-Brown had made an ill-judged joke about older members needing to ’empty their colostomy bags’, and was widely blamed for the divisive proposal to end the Eton v Harrow and Oxford v Cambridge matches at Lord’s.
That move, endorsed by Stephen Fry, who, to the bewilderment of many, had been made President of the MCC, a one-year, honorific appointment, provoked a ferocious outcry led the by inimitable Henry Blofeld, who’d been given a standing ovation at Lord’s after delivering his final Test Match Special commentary five years earlier.
‘You can’t tell me the committee can’t find room in the fixture list for two student fixtures,’ said ‘Blowers’, deriding the committee’s proposal as ‘bonkers’ and describing the reason given for it as ‘palpably untrue’.
On that occasion, Carnegie-Brown and the committee backed down, agreeing that the fixtures could remain in place for another five years after which their future would be put to another vote.
That concession appears to have emboldened critics. ‘It’s time to give another kicking to the t**** in charge of the woke agenda,’ one of the rebels tells me.
Mike Hall, leader of the MCC Reform Group, puts it more diplomatically. ‘The MCC has unfortunately become just like many similar institutions in this country,’ he says in an email to supporters, ‘in that there is a revolving door of the same people being elected time and again.’
A sentiment with which even those unconnected with cricket may agree…
Sunny Laura’s trolls won’t get her down
Feeling the winter blues? A Place In The Sun presenter Laura Hamilton tries to brighten up her fans on social media with photographs of her in the hotspots featured in the property series.
Yet she’s sick of the criticism she gets from some ungrateful souls.
‘People often say, ‘You’re always posting that you’re away’, and I’m like, ‘No, it’s the nature of my job’,’ she tells me at the European premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s Alegria: In A New Light, at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
‘I’ve developed a thick skin, so I don’t let people’s comments impact me.’
Hamilton, 41, who separated from her husband Alex Goward, a broker, in 2022, has just finished filming the first series of spin-off show A Place In The Sun: What Happened Next.
A claim in Country Life magazine that the Marquess of Bath’s Wiltshire seat, Longleat, was the first privately owned stately home to receive paying visitors, in 1949, has caused much spluttering at Hatfield House, the Hertfordshire seat of the Marquess of Salisbury.
His librarian, Robin Harcourt Williams, points out that it opened to the public in 1948, although he concedes: ‘The pioneering tour guides did not then have the expertise that they possess today.’
Dismissing a group of portraits ‘with an airy wave of the hand’, one guide said: ‘The pictures in this room are mostly kings.’ The visitor replied: ‘I know kings are going out of fashion, but one does rather like to know which is which.’
Cate Blanchett proved that she wasn’t helplessly addicted to the spotlight in 2020 when she applied to create a ‘meditation room’ in the grounds of the country house which she and her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, acquired five years earlier in Sussex.
Now, however, the actress has scrapped the plans. The Australian couple had wanted to demolish a derelict cottage and shed to make way for a new complex, which would house the retreat as well as an art gallery.
They were granted planning permission but failed to carry out work within the three-year deadline.
At the time, their planning agent said: ‘The applicants are creative people and it is beneficial for them to have a place that is tranquil and inspires through the art.’
Film director Guy Ritchie, who bought Ashcombe House, a stately home in Wiltshire, when he was married to Queen of Pop Madonna, has the income to match.
I hear that his company, Ashcombe Estates — which oversees his farm, pub, films and barbecue businesses — enjoyed a £7.5 million upturn in retained earnings last year.
According to newly published figures, the firm’s assets increased from £24.9 million in 2022 to £32.4 million.
Most of the money in the business is held in fixed assets such as property.
Dashing actor Matthew Rhys is determined to teach his children his mother tongue, with mixed results. ‘I speak only Welsh to our youngest, Sam, but he’s entering the beginnings of the rebellion,’ Cardiff-born Rhys, 49, says of the seven-year-old.
Rhys fell in love with Sam’s mother, the U.S. actress Keri Russell, 47, after they worked together on spy drama The Americans.
‘I try to explain to him what insurance is in Welsh, and he says, ‘No, just say it in mama’s language’.’ Perhaps he might just not want to discuss insurance, Matthew?
Campbell’s girl mocks King’s operation
Comic Grace Campbell, daughter of Sir Tony Blair’s former propagandist Alastair Campbell, finds King Charles’s serious medical treatment amusing.
Grace, 29, posted a crude, 40-second video online yesterday in which she performed a monologue while pretending to be His Majesty’s prostate speaking to someone on the phone.
‘Apparently I’m everywhere — it’s crazy, they’re debating me on LBC,’ she said in character, before making lewd comments about Queen Camilla.
‘I’m on everybody’s lips… maybe I should get an agent. I gotta go, he [the King] is going to the toilet.’
How pathetic.
Never mind scandals, slights and indiscretions… Gogglebox star Mary Killen explains that keeping a diary has far more practical uses. ‘Every so often, I think: ‘Where’s that scarf?’
Then I look through my diary to see where I was when I ‘lost’ it,’ she tells me at the London launch party for Love From Venice, a memoir based on diaries written 67 years ago by first-time author Gill Johnson, who is nearly 92. At 25, Johnson was plunged into the jet-set world of the Venetian aristocracy.
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Richard Eden
