This has been a traumatic year for several members of the Royal Family – and none more so than for Princess Michael of Kent.
I hear that Marie Christine is unable to use her hands this Christmas after breaking both her wrists in a fall down the stairs at Kensington Palace, where she lives with her husband, Prince Michael, a beloved first cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth.
She attended King Charles’s pre-Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace on Thursday with her wrists encased in splints. The accident comes ten months after the death of her son-in-law and while she continues to recover from heart surgery.
She was carrying an armful of overcoats when the accident happened. Luckily, she fell into the coats but broke multiple small bones when she put out her hands out to break her fall.
‘So many things that you rely on being able to do, like cleaning your teeth, are impossible,’ says the princess, 79, an author. ‘I can type with one finger on a mobile, but I can’t use a laptop.’
She adds: ‘I am told that, after an accident like this, if you do one wrong movement on top of the unhealed bones, you are back where you started.’
Nicknamed ‘Princess Pushy’ because of her supposedly assertive personality, Marie Christine also reveals that she underwent heart surgery a year ago.
‘It shocked me,’ she tells Majesty magazine. ‘I still have to rest every afternoon.’
The princess’s serious health problems come after the tragic death of her son-in-law, Thomas Kingston, who was found dead in February.
Handsome and popular, the financier was married to Prince and Princess Michael’s daughter, Lady Gabriella Windsor.
He died aged 45 from what was described as a traumatic head wound. A gun was found near his body at his parents’ Cotswolds home.
Marie Christine says she had no indication that he was unwell. ‘Tom was a lovely man, so kind and so thoughtful,’ she says. ‘They were very happy together.’
Referring to her son, Lord Frederick Windsor, his wife, the actress Sophie Winkleman, and their two daughters, Isabella and Maud, the princess says: ‘We often had them here with Freddie and Sophie and the girls for Sunday lunch. We never had any inkling anything was wrong.’
Lady Gabriella told the inquest earlier this month that her husband shot himself in an ‘impulsive’ decision caused by an adverse reaction to a cocktail of prescribed drugs.
She insisted that there had been ‘no suicidal indicators’ from her husband and blamed the powerful drugs he was taking for a number of health issues.
Pippa’s in-laws return beavers to glen
Beavers could make an official return to a famous Highlands glen 400 years after being driven to extinction in Scotland – thanks to the family of Pippa Middleton’s husband, James Matthews.
The public body Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) has applied for a licence to release beavers in Glen Affric after the rewilding charity Trees for Life worked on the project with a partnership of FLS and four private landowners, including the Matthews’ Glen Affric Estate.
In 2018, Pippa’s father-in-law, David Matthews, bought the grounds and the house, Affric Lodge, set in 10,000 acres on a loch peninsula.
Keira Knightley has recently filmed at the estate for Netflix and David Beckham made an advert for his Haig Club whisky there in 2014.
Tom earns Tim’s seal of approval
Is Tom Cruise’s latest mission to inspire the next generation of Hollywood heart-throbs?
I ask only because the Mission Impossible star, 62, turned up at a London screening of the forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, in which Timothée Chalamet, 28, plays the musician.
At the Ham Yard Hotel in Soho, 5ft 7in Cruise was snapped with 5ft 10in Chalamet, who has talked previously about how impressed he is by the Top Gun star’s determination to do his own stunts.
Chalamet explained: ‘He basically said, “In old Hollywood you would be getting dance training and fight training. Nobody is going to hold you to that standard today, so it’s up to you”.’
Sarah cashes in her chips
His love for Arsenal – which was ignited when, at nine, he was taken to a Gunners home game for the first time – was as devout as any fan’s.
But it would have been hard to mistake the late Sir Chips Keswick as a man of the people.
Just how hard is made plain by his will, which has been published eight months after his death at 84.
It ensured that almost every penny of his £41million estate goes to his widow, Sarah, pictured with him – one of the Queen’s Companions, who superseded her ladies-in-waiting – and his sons David, Tobias and Adam. Only £47,000 was nabbed by the taxman.
Nepotism is the real Bond villain
As James Bond, Daniel Craig secured his licence to kill by carrying out two assassinations in Casino Royale. In real life, his career trajectory was more drawn out.
The 56-year-old says he faced snobbery and nepotism while starting out in British films. ‘There were brilliant directors… but you had to know the director,’ he complains.
Craig, a contemporary of Hugh Grant and Rupert Everett, adds: ‘There were amazing movies coming out – stuff that no one was going to cast me in because I wasn’t a floppy-fringed posh boy.’
A touching tribute
When it comes to names, some of the biggest in rock have performed at Knebworth, including the Rolling Stones and Queen.
But I hear that Edward Lytton Cobbold, son and heir of the stately home’s owner, Lord Cobbold, has sought inspiration away from music for the name of his first child.
His wife, Helena, a German doctor, has given birth to a girl they have named Hermione – a tribute to Edward’s great-grandmother, Baroness (Hermione) Cobbold.
She inherited the Hertfordshire estate after her brothers died, one in the Second World War and the other in a plane crash.
Getting into character
Line Of Duty star Stephen Graham, who faces an FA probe over a rant at a football ref, may have taken his next TV role too much to heart, cribbing up on London hardmen to play East End boxer Sugar Goodson in A Thousand Blows.
He said: ‘I watched a lot of Ray Winstone and a lot of Bob Hoskins.’
