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The Nazi, the banker and a poisonous feud
The Barclays chief is trying to secure peace in a family row over 'illegitimacy and murder'
Michael Gillard
John Varley, the chief executive of Barclays, has been enlisted by the head of an aristocratic family to prevent his sister from reopening a 30-year feud with a new book.
Her manuscript will explore allegations of Nazism, murder, adultery and illegitimacy that have torn apart the Camoys of Oxfordshire, one of the country’s oldest Catholic families.
Varley has been trying to broker a truce between the head of the family, Thomas Stonor, the 7th Baron Camoys, a lord-in-waiting to the Queen and former director of Barclays, and his eldest sister, Julia Stonor.
The mediation has been taking place while Varley has been fighting to save his job by putting together a £6.5 billion rescue package for Barclays that avoids part nationalisation of Britain’s second largest bank.
Since July, Varley, who controls a trust fund for Julia, has written a series of letters to her and had one meeting. However, the mediation collapsed last week after she accused him of threatening to withdraw her allowance unless she keeps quiet.
Varley, who last year earned £2.42m including a £1.43m bonus, provides Julia with £700 a month from the discretionary trust established by one of her relatives. He has administered it for more than 20 years.
Julia survives on this and a state pension. Income from lodgers – she sleeps on the sofa – barely covers the upkeep of her rundown terraced home in Fulham, west London. In contrast, her merchant banker brother lives in Stonor, the family seat in Henley-on-Thames. He is a former lord chamberlain of the Queen’s household and deputy chairman of Sotheby’s, the auction house.
He has told Julia that she is asking him to atone for things that were not his fault or were beyond his control.
The first volume of Julia’s memoirs was published in 2006 and scandalised many in her extended family. It portrayed her mother, Jeanne Stourton, an Anglo-Spanish debutante, as a Nazi sympathiser who had numerous affairs, with lovers including Count Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister and ambassador to Britain.
She told The Sunday Times: “I am trying to write my second book and I have been threat
ened and threatened and threatened by my brother and all my siblings. John Varley writes on behalf of [my] brother, who is very powerful,” she said.
Based on diaries she has kept since the age of 12, the new volume will delve into allegations that have caused three decades of schism in the Camoys family since the death of their father, Sherman, in 1976.
Julia, 69, believes that her mother slowly poisoned Sherman – the death certificate records influenza and cirrhosis of the liver – and was in turn murdered in the same way 11 years later by her youngest son Robert, who was gay. He died in 1994.
Camoys was also estranged from his mother. However, unlike Julia, he has remained silent. He used the money he made at Rothschild and Barclays to secure the family home after his father died with large debts.
Camoys accepts that Julia was “very badly treated” by their parents – she was banished from the family home as a young girl – and that their wills were “horrible”, according to letters he has sent her.
Julia blames her brother and sisters for ridiculing her murder theory and refusing to exhume their father’s body for investigation. “In the English countryside you can do anything . . . Everything is buried just like that,” she said.
The self-described “scullery maid” unsuccessfully challenged Camoys’s right to the title on the grounds that it should pass through the female bloodline. Behind the claim is Julia’s belief that her mother was wildly promiscuous and she was her parents’ only legitimate child.
In one letter, Camoys replies: “The only injunction I have threatened you with relates to your totally unfounded statements that I, Georgina, Harriet and Robert [the other siblings] are all illegitimate.”
She also believes her mother and others gave false evidence that she, Julia, was insane during a church tribunal hearing in 1978 to annul her marriage. Although the declaration would have no force under English law, she has sought clinical opinions to declare she is sane.
In a letter to her sister Georgina in April, she wrote: “For over 20 years I have been having professional exorcisms to try and lift the curses with which our mother has inflicted me. In the past I have begged you and Thomas to join me in this ‘healing of the family tree’ begun so long ago in Westminster Cathedral. But answer came there none.”
Instead, Camoys turned to Varley, a fellow Catholic he met through Barclays, to seek a withdrawal of these allegations – especially the one questioning his legitimacy – as a precondition of any reconciliation.
Matters appear to have come to a head at a meeting in July this year. Julia rejected Varley’s first draft undertaking, which he had developed with the help of Tony Baldry, a Tory MP who is acting for Julia.
In a follow-up letter to Varley she accused him of “humiliating” her and ignoring her financial plight. “I am already in the trap of acute fuel poverty, the growing chasm between the very rich and the very poor in England,” she wrote.
On Monday, October 13, Varley took time out from negotiating over the government’s proposed £37 billion bailout package for the banks, to write to Julia with a new undertaking to her brother and Georgina. He urged her to sign it.
In the proposed undertaking, she was asked to “unconditionally withdraw” allegations against [Thomas and Georgina] and “undertake not to repeat them either verbally or in writing or in book form.”
The undertaking added: “I too have been wounded over the years by allegations against me and I seek by this letter reciprocal withdrawal of any such views.”
Julia immediately complained to various writers’ groups that she was being “bullied” and “gagged”. She said she had already given Varley an undertaking not to name her brother, his wife or Georgina in the manuscript, which is entitled “Sherman’s Daughter”.
Julia refuses to sign the undertaking. “It is a crucifying experience to be called insane for the last 33 years. It has impacted grievously on my two children. I want an apology and I have an entitlement to compensation,” she says.
Varley and Camoys declined to comment
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle5014716.ece
The Barclays chief is trying to secure peace in a family row over 'illegitimacy and murder'
Michael Gillard
John Varley, the chief executive of Barclays, has been enlisted by the head of an aristocratic family to prevent his sister from reopening a 30-year feud with a new book.
Her manuscript will explore allegations of Nazism, murder, adultery and illegitimacy that have torn apart the Camoys of Oxfordshire, one of the country’s oldest Catholic families.
Varley has been trying to broker a truce between the head of the family, Thomas Stonor, the 7th Baron Camoys, a lord-in-waiting to the Queen and former director of Barclays, and his eldest sister, Julia Stonor.
The mediation has been taking place while Varley has been fighting to save his job by putting together a £6.5 billion rescue package for Barclays that avoids part nationalisation of Britain’s second largest bank.
Since July, Varley, who controls a trust fund for Julia, has written a series of letters to her and had one meeting. However, the mediation collapsed last week after she accused him of threatening to withdraw her allowance unless she keeps quiet.
Varley, who last year earned £2.42m including a £1.43m bonus, provides Julia with £700 a month from the discretionary trust established by one of her relatives. He has administered it for more than 20 years.
Julia survives on this and a state pension. Income from lodgers – she sleeps on the sofa – barely covers the upkeep of her rundown terraced home in Fulham, west London. In contrast, her merchant banker brother lives in Stonor, the family seat in Henley-on-Thames. He is a former lord chamberlain of the Queen’s household and deputy chairman of Sotheby’s, the auction house.
He has told Julia that she is asking him to atone for things that were not his fault or were beyond his control.
The first volume of Julia’s memoirs was published in 2006 and scandalised many in her extended family. It portrayed her mother, Jeanne Stourton, an Anglo-Spanish debutante, as a Nazi sympathiser who had numerous affairs, with lovers including Count Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister and ambassador to Britain.
She told The Sunday Times: “I am trying to write my second book and I have been threat
ened and threatened and threatened by my brother and all my siblings. John Varley writes on behalf of [my] brother, who is very powerful,” she said.
Based on diaries she has kept since the age of 12, the new volume will delve into allegations that have caused three decades of schism in the Camoys family since the death of their father, Sherman, in 1976.
Julia, 69, believes that her mother slowly poisoned Sherman – the death certificate records influenza and cirrhosis of the liver – and was in turn murdered in the same way 11 years later by her youngest son Robert, who was gay. He died in 1994.
Camoys was also estranged from his mother. However, unlike Julia, he has remained silent. He used the money he made at Rothschild and Barclays to secure the family home after his father died with large debts.
Camoys accepts that Julia was “very badly treated” by their parents – she was banished from the family home as a young girl – and that their wills were “horrible”, according to letters he has sent her.
Julia blames her brother and sisters for ridiculing her murder theory and refusing to exhume their father’s body for investigation. “In the English countryside you can do anything . . . Everything is buried just like that,” she said.
The self-described “scullery maid” unsuccessfully challenged Camoys’s right to the title on the grounds that it should pass through the female bloodline. Behind the claim is Julia’s belief that her mother was wildly promiscuous and she was her parents’ only legitimate child.
In one letter, Camoys replies: “The only injunction I have threatened you with relates to your totally unfounded statements that I, Georgina, Harriet and Robert [the other siblings] are all illegitimate.”
She also believes her mother and others gave false evidence that she, Julia, was insane during a church tribunal hearing in 1978 to annul her marriage. Although the declaration would have no force under English law, she has sought clinical opinions to declare she is sane.
In a letter to her sister Georgina in April, she wrote: “For over 20 years I have been having professional exorcisms to try and lift the curses with which our mother has inflicted me. In the past I have begged you and Thomas to join me in this ‘healing of the family tree’ begun so long ago in Westminster Cathedral. But answer came there none.”
Instead, Camoys turned to Varley, a fellow Catholic he met through Barclays, to seek a withdrawal of these allegations – especially the one questioning his legitimacy – as a precondition of any reconciliation.
Matters appear to have come to a head at a meeting in July this year. Julia rejected Varley’s first draft undertaking, which he had developed with the help of Tony Baldry, a Tory MP who is acting for Julia.
In a follow-up letter to Varley she accused him of “humiliating” her and ignoring her financial plight. “I am already in the trap of acute fuel poverty, the growing chasm between the very rich and the very poor in England,” she wrote.
On Monday, October 13, Varley took time out from negotiating over the government’s proposed £37 billion bailout package for the banks, to write to Julia with a new undertaking to her brother and Georgina. He urged her to sign it.
In the proposed undertaking, she was asked to “unconditionally withdraw” allegations against [Thomas and Georgina] and “undertake not to repeat them either verbally or in writing or in book form.”
The undertaking added: “I too have been wounded over the years by allegations against me and I seek by this letter reciprocal withdrawal of any such views.”
Julia immediately complained to various writers’ groups that she was being “bullied” and “gagged”. She said she had already given Varley an undertaking not to name her brother, his wife or Georgina in the manuscript, which is entitled “Sherman’s Daughter”.
Julia refuses to sign the undertaking. “It is a crucifying experience to be called insane for the last 33 years. It has impacted grievously on my two children. I want an apology and I have an entitlement to compensation,” she says.
Varley and Camoys declined to comment
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle5014716.ece
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