His might sound like a gilded, enviable life, not least because he inherited his grandfather’s earldom before his fourth birthday and spent his infancy running barefoot around the Caribbean island of Mustique.
But that would gloss over the death of Joe Hardwicke’s father Philip ‘Pips’, Viscount Royston, from heart failure aged 34 – and his mother Virginia’s battle with the bottle, which she lost at 47.
Those blows were made no easier to bear by society’s hostility towards Virginia’s choice of lover after Pips’s death, Mustique bar-owner Basil Charles.
So it’s heartening that, aged 54, Joe, the 10th Earl of Hardwicke, has a shot at lasting happiness. He has, I can disclose, become engaged to PR and media consultant Nicola Osmond-Evans, 51.
‘We’re delighted to confirm our engagement,’ he tells me.
It’s the second shot at marital bliss for Joe, a recruitment consultant, who was previously married to South African-born Siobhan Loftus, ten years his senior.
Joe Hardwicke, the 10th Earl of Hardwicke, with his fiancee Nicola Osmond-Evans
A young Joe, bottom right, with his mother Virginia, sister Jemima, ‘surrogate’ father Basil and his children Reynold and Liz
They wed in 2008 and she gave birth to a son, whom they named Philip after Joe’s father, the following year.
A decade earlier, Joe had suffered the worst crisis of his adult life. By then, he’d become the youngest hereditary member of the House of Lords – he first took his seat aged 22 – and was also the co-owner of a business selling motor scooters.
In 1998, a Middle-Eastern caller placed an order for 50 off-road scooters, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
It was actually the first part of a ‘sting’ by an undercover reporter, which eventually led to Joe being given a two-year suspended sentence for supplying cocaine. But the jury made a point of recording the ‘extreme provocation’ of the methods used by the News of the World to entrap him.
He and his sister, Lady Jemima, regarded Basil as a surrogate father and his children, Reynold and Liz, as siblings.
A family friend recalls how the young Joe loathed leaving Mustique for prep school – and later for Marlborough College.
‘He was aged about ten and came back, I think, with his aunt, [Lady] Amabel Lindsay,’ the family friend tells me. ‘They hadn’t even got to Barbados when Joe said, “I’m missing Basil already”.’
Basil attended Prince William and Kate’s 2011 wedding. Let’s hope he can make it to Joe’s.
What an undignified end for The Lady, Britain’s oldest – and stateliest – magazine for women.
I recently disclosed that the journal, which was founded two years before Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee and included Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll among its contributors, had gone into liquidation.
Yesterday, its Statement of Affairs was published, reporting that it owes creditors £700,000 as part of a £1.9million deficiency.
Actor cut from Musk doc
Homeland star David Harewood has revealed he was axed from narrating a documentary about billionaire Elon Musk because his voice was ‘too warm’.
The actor, 59, says he was hired to do a voiceover for a programme about the Tesla and SpaceX boss, but the experience quickly soured.
‘I was constantly being asked to re-record passages and told to make my voice colder, flatter, less warm – all the things that my voice isn’t,’ he says.
The next day he received a call from his agent to say he was being dropped from the job – but would be paid in full. ‘Without skipping a beat I said, “I see NO downside to this. Happy to move on”,’ says David.
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, 38, is doing her best to keep Burberry classy. She poses in a bikini for the brand’s latest campaign
After former EastEnders actress and chronic cocaine user Danniella Westbrook was splashed across the papers dressed head-to-toe in Burberry’s check in 2002, the classic British label decided to take drastic action to shed its downmarket image.
It appointed US high-flyer Angela Ahrendts as chief executive and designer Christopher Bailey to make the brand fashionable again. And model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is doing her best to keep Burberry classy.
Rosie, 38, who has two children with A-list actor Jason Statham, poses in a bikini for the brand’s latest campaign, left. She first worked with Burberry in 2008.
Former EastEnders actress and chronic cocaine user Danniella Westbrook was splashed across the papers dressed head-to-toe in Burberry’s check in 2002
Sir Ian McKellen will appear in a film directed by an Eton pupil after being contacted by the school.
Jacob Franklin, 14, says he ‘wasn’t really expecting a reply’ from the actor, but Sir Ian, 85, said he was ‘really inspired by this’.
In the film, Dragged Through Time, he plays a character inspired by gay people from the 1970s and 80s.
‘I often look back to myself at [Jacob’s] age and [have] regret,’ says Sir Ian, who didn’t publicly reveal he was gay until 1988.
Eugenie raises £1m
Some charities end up receiving little from fancy fundraising galas once costs are deducted.
So hats off to Princess Eugenie, whose organisation The Anti-Slavery Collective received £1.1million from its inaugural Force for Freedom Gala after £280,000 was spent on the London event.
The figures are reported in newly published accounts for the charity, which Eugenie co-founded in 2017. Superstar Ed Sheeran, Formula One reporter Natalie Pinkham and You’re Beautiful singer James Blunt attended the fundraiser.
