The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie

The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn comes inevitably to mind here, as does the Earl of Warminster — ‘Erry’ — in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

As his name would suggest, Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet ‘Jack’ Hastings, the 16th Earl of Huntingdon, emerged into the world bedecked with promisingly absurd trappings. And for a time it looked as if his life would follow a predictably conventional path. But then everything changed.

After some routine torturing by his nanny — she branded him with an iron — he went to Eton. There, he failed to trouble the scorers academically, but scraped into Oxford, where he was a member of both the Bullingdon and another, even more boisterous, drinking club called Loder’s, whose toast was ‘Long live the King and Foxhunting!’

Most popular

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky counters Trump’s surrender deal

Proudly clutching his third-class degree, Hastings went off to a dinner at the Savoy, where he met an Italian girl called Cristina Casati. Cristina was the daughter of the Marchesa Casati, a notorious narcissist who was the first, and quite possibly only person to have the whole of St Mark’s Square in Venice closed for a private party. The Marquesa made her entrance accompanied by two diamond-collared cheetahs and a pair of naked boys covered in gold paint.

An accomplished ukelele player and keen tango dancer, Cristina had inherited her mother’s flair for the dramatic if not her looks — she had teeth like Bugs Bunny. Hastings was instantly smitten and the two of them eloped to Australia.

However, he soon regretted his impulsiveness. Cristina turned out to have a foul temper, as well as a fondness for writing some of the most glutinously self-obsessed letters ever penned — ‘Cristy is feeling well! Let me know a short time before you return so I can let my nalis [sic] grow in your honour.