Pippa Middleton’s new brother-in-law is a cocaine snorting playboy who boasts he’s bedded 1000 women including a Canadian-sixsome.
The joke going around the corridors of Buckingham Palace last night was about black sheep and families. It was all very well having one black sheep in the family, but two . . .?
As the world digested the news that Pippa Middleton was engaged to hedge fund manager James Matthews, amateur genealogists at the palace pored over this delicious irony.
Pippa, of course, boasts her own colourful family member in the shape of her roistering four times-married uncle Gary Goldsmith, her mother Carole’s younger brother. In true black sheep tradition, Goldsmith once dated a former lapdancer and was exposed by undercover reporters for a Sunday newspaper chopping up lines of cocaine with a €100 note at his luridly-named mansion, La Maison de Bang-Bang on the party island of Ibiza.
Not far from uncle Gary’s home in Central London, the handsome Matthews — who, as I revealed yesterday, proposed to his fiancee with a fabulous three-carat diamond ring on the summit of a hill in the Lake District — has his own lurking family skeleton. Step forward his younger brother Spencer, 28 next month, who made his name as a louche ladies man on the inane reality TV show Made In Chelsea.
A photo posted by Spencer Matthews (@spencermatthews) on May 8, 2016 at 1:44am PDT
With five headline-winning years on the show behind him, Old Etonian Spencer has proved that fame doesn’t have to be fleeting for a reality star.
He shrugged off allegations of coke-snorting and claims that he lost his virginity at 13 and has bedded 1,000 women. He survived a crash in a Lamborghini during the Dodgeball Rally, a rich-kids car rally across Europe, and was red-top fodder, as stories of his bed-hopping became legend.
So far, so Sloaney. But even after stepping aside from E4’s ‘structured reality’ show about posh 20-somethings inhabiting the affluent postcodes of West London — allegedly as a favour to his brother to avoid the Middletons’ disapproval — Spencer remains a favourite of the celebrity circuit.
He and his fellow Made In Chelsea stars have a cult following among the show’s young fans and enjoy an enviable lifestyle of luxury travel and lucrative personal appearances, minutely detailed in Instagram posts and social media chit-chat.
It is all a long way from what he describes as the ‘modest and discreet’ life of his big brother James, who has made a small fortune, first as a derivatives trader in the City of London and later from the property market and hedge funds.
Friends of Spencer, who is 13 years younger than his brother, say that while he possesses all the smooth charm of an ex-Eton boy, he has not yet turned that into the kind of hard cash that has made James such asuccess.
Not that he should be under any illusions. Despite an upbringing of considerable privilege — their father David, a coal miner’s son, is a multi-millionaire businessman — the family motto has been one of self-reliance.
‘My dad doesn’t believe in hand-outs; he says they don’t create the strength of character — and that’s fine by me,’ Spencer once declared.
It was a hint that he does not automatically expect to inherit a great fortune from his parents, who have turned the once-neglected Eden Rock in St Barts in the French Caribbean into one of the most exclusive hotels in the world, where everyone from Beyoncé to Elton John, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio has stayed.
Spencer, it must be said, did not set out to be a black sheep. Indeed, I can reveal that when he joined the cast of Made In Chelsea in 2011, he was holding down a steady job as a foreign exchange trader at City tycoon Michael Spencer’s Icap currency brokers.
Up until then it seemed he was destined to follow in the (very) lucrative steps of James, who eschewed university to train as a trader. But perhaps his brother’s success and the gap in their ages were factors that encouraged him to look for for other diversions.
Certainly Spencer looked up to his three siblings, Nina, James and Michael, who tragically died in a mountaineering accident on Everest hours after becoming the youngest Briton to conquer the peak.
‘As a boy, I wanted Nina’s heart of gold, Mike’s general character and James’s girlfriends,’ Spencer wrote in his autobiography, Confessions Of A Chelsea Boy.
‘Although both my brothers had good taste in women, James was always the pickiest of the two. He had some incredible girlfriends.’
None more so, one suspects, than the spectacular girl he has chosen to make his wife. All the same this observation represents quite an accolade, for Spencer is a voracious womaniser who owes much of his fame to his relentless pursuit of the opposite sex.
Yet when his memoir was published in 2013, Spencer’s bed-hopping was almost overshadowed by other more eye-catching revelations. It told in vulgar detail how Spencer had dabbled with cocaine and LSD, spent almost every night for months on end drinking and cavorting in nightclubs, while enjoying countless sexual liaisons.
A photo posted by Spencer Matthews (@spencermatthews) on May 25, 2016 at 10:38am PDT
One such encounter descended into a group sex session with six participants, including a man who attempted to perform a sex act on him which, he said, was ‘not my thing’.
He claimed to have had the ‘sixsome’ with a group of Canadian tourists. ‘It was entertaining,’ he recalled. ‘The bed wasn’t quite big enough for the six of us, but we managed it anyway.’
A photo posted by Spencer Matthews (@spencermatthews) on May 15, 2016 at 6:26am PDT
As for his drug-taking, he recalls of his first episode: ‘I knew taking cocaine wasn’t right . . . and like most parents, mine had warned me away from drugs. But sometimes people want to experience things for themselves.’
After experimenting with LSD at a rave he said he went on a ‘30-hour trip’. On the drugs theme, the book includes some homespun whimsy. ‘I think it is a simple thing to say I don’t condone drugs and people make mistakes — and sometimes mistakes are repeated.’
A year earlier he had been filmed snorting white powder at a house party. None of this dented his confidence or his popularity. Certainly it did not damage his reputation in the lothario stakes.
He was linked to Topshop tycoon Sir Philip Green’s daughter Chloe, model Funda Onal and his Made In Chelsea co-star Caggie Dunlop.
While his brothers had been educated at Uppingham, Spencer went to Eton — an experience he made the best of.
‘I went to Eton and I loved my time there, but I didn’t choose to go,’ he said. ‘My father started his life as a mechanic. He did very well for himself and wanted the best for his children. Anyone would be the same.’
After drifting into nightclub PR work, acting and that brief stint on the trading floor, Spencer decided he wanted to be famous. He adored the celebrity that television brought him, and revelled in being one of the most talked-about bachelors in Britain. On a visit to Dubai he boasted he had been recognised by ‘three women in burkas’.
A photo posted by Spencer Matthews (@spencermatthews) on Jan 9, 2015 at 8:07am PST
Since leaving Made In Chelsea, Spencer has calmed down. But the showy side of his life is still there.
On his Instagram account he has posted pictures with Pippa’s hirsute brother James comparing their beards, prompting mischievous talk of a ‘bromance’ between the two.
And trouble still seemed to follow him around. Last year he was forced to quit ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here after it emerged he had an addiction to steroids.
Flashing his pecs has been something of an occupational habit for Spencer, who like his brother and his soon-to-be sister-in-law is a fan of extreme sports like marathon running.
Yet for a young man who likes to detail every aspect of his life to his 775,000 followers on his Twitter account, Spencer remained resolutely silent about his brother’s romance.
Friends say the two men are ‘tribally loyal’ to their family. And what draws them together more than anything is the loss of their brother Michael.
In 1999 when Spencer was only ten, Mike, then 23, was lost on Everest. His body has never been found and in his memory the family set up the Michael Matthews Foundation, which helps provide schooling in Nepal, Thailand and Africa. James has run long-distance races to raise money for the charity, and Spencer donated part of the proceeds from his memoir.
If nothing else, the marriage of the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister Pippa to the brother of a reality TV star will demonstrate the broadening social horizons of the Royal Family in the 21st century.
Daily Mail