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Queen's joy opens door to Catholics

Last updated at 22:00 29 October 2006

The Queen has revealed her personal happiness at the wedding of her cousin Lord Nicholas Windsor, in a move that signals the thawing of years of royal prejudice towards Roman Catholics.

In a private letter to Catholic convert Lord Nicholas, I can disclose, she said she was ‘delighted’ and ‘very pleased’ by his marriage next week to British-born Croat Paola Frankopan — the first to be held in the Vatican by a member of the Royal Family for more than 400 years.

I understand that her pleasure stems from her own belief that shared faith can sustain a marriage. Last month I revealed how the Queen had granted her permission for the Duke and Duchess of Kent’s bookish son to marry in Rome.

Now she has agreed to attend a lavish reception at St James’s Palace along with other members of the Royal Family to celebrate the wedding in January.

Prince Charles, who is Nicholas’s godfather, will also be at the party, because he will be returning from an official visit to Pakistan and is unable to attend Saturday’s nuptials.

Intriguingly, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has used the upcoming marriage to tell how old barriers between the royals and the Church are breaking down.

He says the Queen is ‘happy’ about the wedding between ‘a delightful couple’. But the Cardinal, who has stayed with the Queen at Sandringham, also suggests authoritatively that there will be a change to the current laws which prevent the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic.

‘As for Prince William being able to marry anyone but a Catholic — that will go eventually,’ he tells the Catholic Herald. ‘But I don’t think we need to make a big song and dance about it now. It will disappear.’

As William’s long-term girlfriend, Kate Middleton, is not a Catholic anyway, the Cardinal may well be right to kick the issue into the long grass.

For now, Lord Nicholas, 36, and his Cambridge-educated bride, 37, have invited another convert to conduct their marriage service. He is former Anglican vicar Alan Hopes, the auxiliary bishop of Westminster, who quit the C of E in protest at its decision to ordain women priests.

Checking out the window display of her local branch of Daunt Books yesterday, Holland Park’s most prolific historian Lady Antonia Fraser must have been disappointed.

For there was no sign of her latest work, Love And Louis XIV. Undaunted, she went inside, where her purchases included a book by fellow biographer A.N. Wilson.

Erin stops fur flying in fashion party catfight

Androgynous model Erin O’Connor may want to take a gumshield and sponge bucket when next she turns up at a fashion soiree.

At the latest London party thrown by cultural bible Cent, an event ironically dubbed Return To Elegance, the 28-year-old face of Marks & Spencer had to interpose her six-foot frame between a magazine editor and another woman to halt their catfight.

The unseemly scene unfolded as guests such as designers Matthew Williamson and Roland Mouret, plus models Lily Cole and Jade Parfit, sipped their Gran Centenario tequila cocktails in the Coronet at Elephant and Castle.

Says my man ringside: ‘All the A-listers were in this packed VIP room and there was a row over the refreshments.

‘One woman slapped the other and they began grappling. They barged into a table, drinks got spilled and the fashion pack began scattering.

‘But Erin very calmly defused the situation. She just went up and said: “Hey, hey — let’s stop all this and calm down.” And they did. She was marvellous.’

Frank Bowling, the only black British artist elected to the Royal Academy in its 238 years, has fallen out with veteran critic Robert Hughes.

The Guyana-born painter claims Hughes, art critic for high-minded Time magazine, has a vendetta against black artists ‘because his first wife ran off with civil rights radical Stokely Carmichael.

‘I know Hughes has a career of persecution against the most gifted black artists of my generation,’ he thunders.

But Hughes says he and his first wife, Danne, ‘never so much as met Stokely Carmichael’.

In his recently published memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, he does acknowledge she was infatuated with one of Carmichael’s fellow Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver. During the troubled marriage, Danne also bedded rock star Jimi Hendrix.

Prince's music request, no strings!

When Prince Albert II of Monaco spotted perky violinist Linzi Stoppard performing at a party and asked her — through a lackey — to play for him at a private dinner, she was concerned about his intentions.

‘I thought it sounded a bit dodgy, as he has quite a reputation with the ladies, but when I met Albert he was absolutely lovely,’ says former model Linzi, 33, who last year married playwright Sir Tom Stoppard’s son Will.

‘It turns out that there are going to be 45 people at the dinner, including his sisters Caroline and Stephanie and their children. I’m flying out to Monaco in January — and my husband is coming too.’

Hopefully he will be there in a purely social capacity, as Linzi tells me that she is looking for a new manager, a role which her husband has been performing as an interim solution.

‘Will has been acting as my manager for a while now,’ she told me at the launch of the Audi A8 sports car in Canary Wharf. ‘He has managed quite a few bands in the past, but it’s not really an ideal situation.

‘At the moment he’s my manager until 6pm, and after that he’s my husband.’

From the bracing environs of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Ingrid Tarrant tells me she has been amused by reports of her friendship with handsome actor Danny McCall, 20 years her junior.

Ingrid, who took her 15-year-old son Toby and four friends to the Lancashire resort, says there is sadly no chance of unmarried Danny being the new man in her life.

She tells me: ‘He is great company and we’ve been friends for ages. But he is asexual as far as I am concerned.’

Danny, who is said to have dated his Brookside co-star Tiffany Chapman, was also once a close buddy of the Queen’s stylish designer Stewart Parvin, a confirmed bachelor.