Golden days of Hickey and how we helped tumble the paper palace of bogus Prince George

ROYAL FRAUDS: de Chabris and his princess, also known as Jan Jackson,
a bit-part actress from Wisconsin

By CHRISTOPHER WILSON, former editor of the William Hickey column

BEING William Hickey wasn't all writs, tits, and cocktails at The Ritz — though I daresay they might have come into it.

To me it was a daily struggle to find something new to say about a class and breed of people that was fast evaporating before my very eyes.

In the column we had the customary window-dressing of dowagers, dickheads and debs, but there was a hidden desire – on my watch, at least — to de-trouser some of the inflated public figures who took our admiration and cynically turned it to their advantage.

Jeffrey Archer immediately springs to mind, and we had a few hits there. I didn't much care for Victor ‘Disgusting’ Lownes who ran the Playboy Club, and he was obliged to lift the phone to lawyers on more than one occasion.

Then there was always the smattering of boastful backbenchers, latter-day Fabricants, clamouring for attention and hoping for a column inch or two. Sir 'Dirty Dai' Llewellyn, so-called Seducer of the Valleys, often pleaded “Give us a mention, love.”

Fraffle people – why were we writing about them?

The private challenge for me was to try to match the ferocious talent over on the news desk – Bob McGowan, Mike O'Flaherty, John Burns, many more – all of whom had the guts and wherewithal to chase down exclusives in the teeth of hefty opposition.

Their audaciousness I found dazzling. One of them, maybe Ashley Walton, told me how he brought back a chat with some idiot who'd barricaded himself in after a particularly unpleasant event and wasn't talking. “Kicked the door in – told 'im I smelt gas.” Got the exclusive.

The photographers, too = not only outstanding technicians and artists but brave as lions. Bill Lovelace got seriously duffed up and his spectacles broken by Sir Jimmy Goldsmith's henchmen when we were in Paris covering the tyrant's clandestine marriage to Lady Annabel, but he walked away with a shrug. I was round the corner in the getaway car and the shame of not being there to throw a punch or two on his behalf is with me to this day.

I recall Ross Benson telling me that, sheltering from terrifying Mujahideen helicopter gunship fire, he turned to John Downing and quipped, “You know John, on the whole I'd rather be in Annabel's.”

Downing looked at him stonily. “What's Annabel's?” he said.

This was the red meat of journalism while I was providing the cake crumbs. But we occasionally got a hit, and one I particularly cherish was ridding the country of a political swindler called Prince George de Chabris.

If there's one thing a gossip column training's good for, it's smelling a rat —people who award themselves non-existent titles. Down the carriage-trade end of journalism we came across loads of them.

But to con a major political party out of its headquarters, steal its treasures, award yourself a salary and have MPs kiss your arse requires some extra-special talent, and Prince George had it in spades.

I took a call from an old friend living in Kent who remarked on the flamboyant lifestyle of someone who'd just moved into his village. Fat, ungainly, overbearing, he had the smell of Bob Maxwell about him.

I was intrigued to learn that he was calling himself 'His Serene Highness Prince George de Chabris' and, appetite whetted, started to dig into his life. Before long it emerged he was Canadian and a Jew, both of which raised an immediate question mark over the royal moniker.

But others were less inquisitive.

The then Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, himself no stranger to invention, handed over the National Liberal Club in Whitehall to de Chabris in an attempt to save it from liquidation.

Hickey let the world know that this was probably a bad idea, over successive days peeling back the layers of the de Chabris onion. He was not the Duke de Vatan as he claimed, nor the Baron de Mornay. His princely title did not come from the Holy Roman Empire or indeed from anywhere that could be traced (European nobility being punctilious in recording the names and titles of its membership). His wife came not from some ancient aristocratic lineage but was actually Jan Jackson, a bit-part actress from Wisconsin.

De Chabris claimed to be a multi-millionaire willing to pour cash into the club and save it from closure, and everybody swallowed his whoppers — with the exception of Hickey, whose inquiries were ongoing. Soon the prince moved his family into the ancient Whitehall clubhouse rent-free, started to run several fraudulent businesses from the premises, paid for a sports car and his children's private school fees from the club accounts, and helped himself liberally to the contents of the wine cellar.

Finally people started to wake up and smell the ersatz coffee. Private Eye, then the Guardian, followed Hickey's lead and the prince's paper palace slowly started to tumble.

He fled owing the club £60,000, even emptying the cash till of the day's takings as he went. He'd also sold the club a fraudulent painting.

Worse, he flogged off the Club's Gladstone Library which contained the largest collection of 17th-to-20th-century political material in the country, on the pretext the club could no longer afford the librarian's wages.

Then he was gone. A moonlight flit – back to Canada? Florida? New York? — who knows, but he'd skedaddled before he could wreak worse damage on the suckers who'd given him free reign to plunder the last resources of a once-great political party.

We covered all that in Hickey – though never quite knowing whether our readers might secretly prefer to read about where Joan Collins was buying her push-up bras these days, or the name of Prince Philip's latest squeeze.

Running Hickey, you were always on a hiding to nothing. Sooner or later it would be time to fold the tent and move on.

19 April, 2025