Huzzah for Duchess Fergie and Heather Mills, who make somewhat scene-stealing entries to the Panama Papers.
We begin with Fergie, who appeared in this column last week as the inaugural subject of an employment news series entitled “You’re A What Now?” The occasion was her unveiling as the ambassador for a lifestyle app.
Speaking of lifestyles, then, let’s proceed to the Panama Papers. “The documents reveal a degree of chaos around the Duchess of York’s finances,” notes the Guardian’s report delicately. “Letters between Mossack Fonseca and Sarah Ferguson’s solicitors show the advisers of Prince Andrew’s former wife trying to make sense of her assets.”
Oh my God, what were they thinking? I can only imagine that to journey through Fergie’s finances is to encounter endless metaphorical signposts reading TURN BACK! TURN BACK! The thought of the solicitors ignoring them and persisting casts them as nothing short of those mathematicians who are eventually driven mad in the search for a formula. Come on: you’ve seen the movies. So you know the sort of thing. What starts off as a perfectly standard Windsor legal office ends up with unintelligible algebra scribbled all over the walls and ceiling, whose gibbering, wildly unkempt occupants are eventually wheeled off to the psychiatric ward shrieking things like “But wait! if I could just work out the algorithm of her Lifestyle Ambassador’s remuneration package …”
Anyway, on to Heather Mills, who also features in the data leak, having invested in a health food firm trying to drill for fatty acids or something. She lost the money, she says, adding memorably: “I can say, hand on heart, I am a straight taxpayer and you will never find anything on me if you investigate thoroughly.”
Please don’t call for the defibrillator. If Heather’s word is anything, it is her absolute bond, as any regular readers of this column will know. My message to my journalistic colleagues looking into her tax affairs is quite simple: do you honestly want to pick a fight with the woman whose autobiography reveals her to have been the person who – among many other eye-popping achievements – personally notified the BBC and other British media to the outbreak of civil war in the former Yugoslavia, weeks after it happened? I hardly think you do, and advise you to draw an end to this nonsense at once.
