THE WRONG SORT OF MILLIONAIRE
Boris Johnson talks to Judith Keppel about fame, fortune and tabloid envy
00H, it's a fix. It's corrupt, said the Fleet Street moralists, and it's certainly not appropriate. The Guardian loaded its fonts with bile and said that her victory was like that of George Bush in Florida, an affront to decency and fair play. Tabloid telephoto posses were sent to monster her children, her ex-husbands, and to camp on her Ful- ham doorstep. Crack genealogists were deployed to research the link between the mild-mannered blonde and anyone involved in producing the television show that stunned the nation. Wasn't her ex-husband a scriptwriter for Jasper Carrott? Wasn't that pretty damn fishy? sneered the Mail on Sunday. For some mid-market tabloids, it was near unbearable to see the daughter of the son of the ninth earl of Albemarle become the first to scoop the jackpot in Britain's most demotic quiz show.
Not her, they said, not after two years in which the great British public has scratched its bonce and asked to phone a friend to discover the meaning of 'plangent', or whether a marmoset was a) a fish b) a cat c) a primate or d) a baked bean. Huh, the Daily Mail told its readers. This was no 'humble Fulham gardener'. She has inherit- ed four portraits by well-known artists, raged Levy and Kay. 'What must be said is that here is a twice-married and twice- divorced lady whose life and times on the cusp of aristocratic high society have never been less than comfortable.' Not only is she a relation of Camilla Parker Bowles and a descendant of the mistress of Edward VII, but she was captain of tennis at St Mary's, Wantage. She's a bleeding toff.
Wouldn't it have been nicer, said the Guardian, if someone poor could have won? Weren't the questions, frankly, on the easy side that night? demanded the press. And wasn't it time someone interro- gated her properly? It was. It is. So I decide to smother my admiration for the woman who knows that a squab is the off- spring of a pigeon rather than (as I, ahem, believed) a salmon.
Oh no, I think, as I sit opposite her in the Colombier, a restaurant in the region of her (snarl) £500,000 house, and to which she has come by means of her (gah) N-registered Golf. I'm going to be true to my profession. I'm going to get to the bot- tom of this. I'm not going to fall at her feet just because she's a good-looking aristo with oceanic blue eyes. On behalf of the British viewer, I want to know if the fix was in. Almost everyone seems to have witnessed the moment she won, when poor Victor Meldrew was left to die unseen on the other channel. She just happened to have spotted the tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine while on holiday somewhere (Aquitaine?), and knew that she was mar- ried to Henry II. And that was it. Pow: she was a millionaire, and submitting without complaint to the labrador lickings of Chris Tarrant.
So what was it like, eh, Judith? What was it like when yer scored the lolly? 'The minute I won, that was fantastic, but then I was completely taken aback by the avalanche of publicity.' It was only a few days later, when staying with her mother, that she suddenly woke up and felt 'won- derful'. 'There's a huge John Lewis in Southampton and everybody recognised me, which was quite extraordinary, and they were all so nice. I haven't had a nasty experience from a member of the public. They all came up and said, "Can I touch you, for good luck?"' But look here, what was a nice gel like you doing in a racket like this, eh? Who gave you the idea?
'Right from the beginning I saw it as a frightfully good opportunity to make some money because I realised that if you were lucky with the questions and didn't get asked too many pop stars and footballers, you could win a great deal of money.' Yes, she insists, gazing with those china eyes which see into your soul, and which some- how give not the slightest sense of greed. She really went for it. For days she besieged the programme's 5,000 premium- rate phone-lines, manned 24 hours a day. BT rang her to warn her of the alarming kink in her bill. Then there was a magic message on her answering machine. She rang. They asked her how many Lib Dem MPs there were, and she said 43, which was closer than anyone else (correct answer 46), and she was on! She didn't tell her mother, or any of her aunts, of whom she has four or five and who are 'like the ones in P.G. Wodehouse, only more pro- gressive. I was afraid they might disap- prove.
'In the morning I went for a walk to calm my nerves, and I found a ten-pound note in the street, and there it was, crushed in the mud. I wondered, should I take it to the corner shop or not. But it was just by the football ground, and it was pretty torn up, and so I kept it. I didn't want to spend it because I thought it might be an omen.'
Well, darlin', yer don't need that note any more, hur hur. So how come you knew all that stuff, about the squab and all? Well, she listens to Radio Four, where you learn the most extraordinary things, and she reads a lot. She has just finished the third Harry Potter book, the one with the Dementors who suck out your soul, whom she likens to tabloid journalists. And then, she points out, the contestants have unlim- ited time to answer, a fact concealed from the audience by editing. "there are people who sit there [she makes a straining expression] for 20 minutes.'
So it genuinely wasn't a fix, Judith? You won, just like that, fair dinkum, you of all the millions of wannabes; lovely, blue- blooded, mother-of-three, bereavement counsellor turned landscape gardener?
'I don't see how it could have been a fix,' she says. 'There was a man locked in the room who sent the questions to Chris Tar- rant on his computer, and he was there throughout the recording.' OK, so what do you make of the rage and spleen of Fleet Street, and all this talk of posh dosh? 'Well, what they don't seem to under- stand,' she says, toying with her cutlets, 'is that you can have toff relations, but equal- ly you can have not very much money. My particular bit of the family are not rich. My grandfather sold our family house in Nor- folk after the war because they thought that way of life was over. It's now a Carmelite convent at Quidenham.'
Of course, she says, it's a lot of money now sitting in her higher-rate deposit account, and she's not sure how she'll Spend it, except possibly on a house in France. 'But to keep things in proportion, Elton could spend that much in a fort- night.' So she'd encourage the rest of the toffs to have a go with Tarrant, the poor ones, the penniless dukes? 'I don't see why a duke couldn't apply. Why not? The Duke of Beaufort,' she chuckles.
As for the press, and their meanness and chippiriess, 'It's the last throw, really. They are stamping on us now. There's no power base, no House of Lords.. . . It's the last Opportunity to stamp on us. They'd have gone for you, if you had won it,' Just then, two Fulham women appear from an adja- cent table. 'Darling Judith,' cries one of them, and comes over for a kiss. 'I don't know who you are,' says Judith, which is forgivable since the woman is wearing a fur cap pulled down over her eyes. It turns out she used to run a marvellous exercise class called Granny's, which Judith used to go to 25 years ago.
In a way, she says, resuming, she has struck a small blow on behalf of the dis- possessed nobs, who have been done in by Punitive taxation. 'I think toffs ought to line up in rows, and sign on, and fight back bit.' What, by going on quiz shows? That's one way of doing it.'
Good for you, Judith, I think, and, in my boundless admiration, I try a few ques- tions. Was Thetis the mother of a) Perseus ID) Achilles c) Odysseus d) Diomedes? Patiently, carefully, by a process of elimi- nation, she gets it.
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