Kate Middleton's Mustique Vacation Is Royal Pain for Other Guests

Kate Middleton's Mustique Vacation Is Royal Pain for Other Guests - While Kate Middleton and her family enjoy a luxurious vacation holed up in a $23,000 per week mansion on the Caribbean island of Mustique, the rest of the island is on near lockdown, upsetting tourists and locals.

The Mustique Company, which owns the Caribbean getaway, is restricting the movements of other guests to protect the Middletons' privacy, the Daily Mail reports.

Tourists have reportedly been banned from using the rented "mules," or golf carts, normally used to zip around the island, and are being quizzed by security before being allowed to access the beach and other island hot spots.

The Middletons - Kate, along with her parents, Michael and Carole, brother, James, and sister, Pippa - jetted off to Mustique on Friday, sitting first class on a British Airways flight out of London's Gatwick Airport, a photographer blogged.

The family, owners of a party-planning business, are frequent visitors to the island and reportedly have looked into purchasing a vacation home there. Kate and her husband, Prince William, traveled there in 2006 for a luxury getaway while they were still dating.

But now the security and strict regulations that follow the Duchess of Cambridge, as Kate became known when she and Prince William tied the knot last April, no matter where she travels are creating a stir, even in an island known for hosting A-listers like Jennifer Lopez and Mick Jagger.

"This isn't exactly the way one expects to be treated when you pay very good money to visit the most exclusive island in the Caribbean," one local told the Daily Mail.

A source told the paper the Mustique Company is covering the costs of the extra security, said to be put in place after discussions with Kate's bodyguards.

"A couple of years ago, don't forget, the Middletons were just a regular family, very regular," Dickie Arbiter, former press secretary to Prince William's grandmother, the Queen, told ABC News.

"Then, Kate met a prince, Pippa wore that dress, and the Middletons, all of them, are now neo-royalty," he said.

The security can be expected to increase even more in the week ahead when Prince Williams joins the family for vacation.

People magazine reports Middleton's husband, the Duke of Cambridge, will join his wife's family in Mustique once his military shift schedule allows. He is currently at RAF base in Anglesey, Wales, fulfilling his duties as a search and rescue helicopter pilot.

Neither the palace nor the Mustique Company had comment on the royal couple's vacation plans. ( ABC News )

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Earl of Cardigan speaks of marriage to woman he met in therapy

Earl of Cardigan speaks of marriage to woman he met in therapy - The Earl of Cardigan has spoken for the first time of how he met his new wife at an American therapy clinic, and that her son believed she was about to become an accountant, not a countess.

The Earl of Cardigan has spoken for the first time about his marriage to a woman he met at an American therapy clinic.

Lord Cardigan, 58, admitted the couple’s courtship had been “pretty strange” because he was being treated for his “despair” after the collapse of his first marriage.

His new bride, Joanne Hill, 46, was at the Trauma Resolution clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico, trying to kick an addiction to prescription pills.

Lord Cardigan said he had decided to speak out partly to correct what suggestions that the new Lady Cardigan had left her husband for him, which he described as “rubbish”.

The old Etonian went to the clinic to help him get over the sudden ending of his marriage to Rosamond, the author of a number of cookbooks.

The then Mrs Hill was being treated for addiction to Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, which she had been prescribed after being sexually assaulted at knifepoint while walking back to her car in Phoenix, Arizona.

David Cardigan, 58, married American Joanne Hill at the beginning of May in a private ceremony in the romantic mediaeval hilltop village of San Miniato, near Pisa in Italy

“I suppose the circumstances of our meeting were pretty strange, because Joanne and I were in therapy,” Lord Cardigan said.

“I was in deep despair and shock in 2005 because of the very sudden termination of my twenty five year marriage. Joanne was there to address the cause of her use of Xanax addiction, which was the attack she had suffered in the first place.

“We met there during very intense therapy when we were both part of the same Trauma Resolution group”.

“Our relationship really began when we went our separate ways at the end of the therapy,” said Lord Cardigan.

“I’d gone to live with my very dear sister Carina, who lives on the Caribbean island of Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.”

He continued: “I missed Joanne hugely, and we began contacting each other, and it grew from there.”

Lord Cardigan attacked what he described as “malicious rubbish” which had been written about their relationship.

“I think it is as good a time as any to put the record straight, starting with the simple fact that Joanne and her husband had already both filed against each other for divorce before she and I ever even met”.

“Actually we first met in a room where the most personal of things had to be openly discussed, and we had to go through the story of our lives examining the good, the bad and the ugly.

“There were no secrets in there, and to that extent we knew some very deep and very personal stuff about each other before our relationship even started, and like everyone else in that group we implicitly trusted each other with all that.”

The couple married at the beginning of May at a private ceremony at San Miniato, a hilltop village near Pisa and have set up home at Lord Cardigan’s estate in Savernake Forest, near Marlborough, Wiltshire.

Lord Cardigan has two children from his previous marriage, Thomas, Viscount Savernake and Lady Catherine, who is better known as Bo Bruce, a singer songwriter, from whom he is estranged.

The new countess has a 13-year-old son, Wolfy.

Lady Cardigan said her first impressions of the man who became her husband was of an stereotypical Briton.

“When I first met David in group therapy I thought he was an archetypal Englishman. Very up-tight and proper, and initially very unwilling to open up, which of course is what Group Therapy is all about.

“But we learned the worst about each other first, and since then I have come to love him for the warm, sensitive man that he is.”

Lord Cardigan said the couple who, having “put the record straight”, were looking forward to starting life together in Wiltshire.

“My heartfelt wish now is to be reconciled with my two children. I've missed them both enormously”. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Why I'll keep opening the door for women

Why I'll keep opening the door for women - Sexism is civilised – whatever the Society for the Psychology of Women might think, says Stephen Bayley.

I always hold the door open for women. But, then, I always hold the door open for men, too. For this small act of graciousness, the peer-reviewed, humourless, bad-tempered, lunatic fringe of feminism – in the form of the Society for the Psychology of Women – now accuses me of "benevolent sexism".

Being, as they insist, a knuckle-dragging male gorilla, I took it to be simple good manners. Thank God I have been corrected before I went too far. Just imagine – I could have ended-up smiling at girls. I was going to write "pretty girls", but it would have been dangerously self-incriminating too early in the piece.

While writing that first paragraph, I said a sly, manipulative "thank you" to a male colleague for the espresso he so kindly put on my desk. I expect he will soon be tempted to raise his game and accuse me of chauvinistic bullying in the workplace. Sisters, believe me, we must be alert and vigilant!

It's an incautious man who makes the case for sexism

In the summer of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's discontent, it's an incautious man who makes the case for sexism. But my roiling cauldron of ungovernable hormones encourages recklessness, so here goes. Sexism is a mark of civilisation, as is all behaviour based on perceptions and intelligently adapted to different circumstances. Life is about gradients – the ascending, sometimes meandering, paths between different values. Vice/virtue, young/old and male/female are simply the most obvious.

Manners are the device we use to negotiate these sometimes tricky and precipitous social slopes. It's a contract based on respect, an unforced standard of conduct intended to enhance another's self-esteem. This is why, when body-checked on the elevator at Piccadilly Circus this morning, I didn't kick the obstructive old boy in the ankle and say: "Get out of my way, you economically insignificant, ugly, feeble-minded crumbling old dotard."

I wonder what goes on in the firmly closed minds behind the bitterly closed doors of the Society for the Psychology of Women. I imagine the stern researchers responsible for coming up with the idea of "benevolent sexism" are charged with scrutinising global media for occult offences against the pure, uncontaminated cause of feminism. Enraged to madness by pervasive images of elegance and notions of courtesy, they remove themselves to the Ops Room to plan a world drained of enchantment and refinement. Fortunately, you can recognise leading Society members quite easily: most have suffered maxillofacial trauma, broken teeth and soft tissue injuries when liberated males, sensitised to the charge of "benevolent sexism", have preferred to let heavy swing doors thud into their faces.

It's true, of course, that new technology has tended to confuse the old contract. Somehow, doors are often involved. That business of opening the car door is made nonsensical when you have a remote blipper to do the central locking. In public buildings, automatic doors remove the need for the farcical theatrics of after-you-no-after-you. Meanwhile, sat-nav has freed women from the irksome, debasing, sexualised chore of map-reading, during which Ordnance Survey sheets were routinely covered by floods of tears.

The victories and liberations of classic feminism have, deservedly, become well-established. I don't think anyone argues about opportunities (equal), ceilings (glass), careers (open to talent), pay (rational) and housework (shared). Advanced males have for 30 years been extremely self-conscious about all of this, and of practising conventional politeness – or, indeed, any sort of conventional gender-based behaviour – lest they be accused of jungle-based stereotyping.

We know all of this. Very glad it happened. And this gives the survival (or revival) of good manners an added force. For my part, I have never met anyone who plays rugby, or been to either a football match or a stag do. And I much prefer that my wife (who is a woman) lets me do the shopping and cooking. Yet I still want to do that courtly thing with doors and compliment women on their appearance. Mind you, I compliment men, too.

This is why the absurdly negativist ideas of the Society for the Psychology of Women are so ugly and wrong. They seek to forbid charm, subtlety and nuance in human behaviour. Still, we must not attribute to malice what can readily be explained by stupidity. Do they have a copy of Doris Langley Moore's The Technique of the Love Affair (1928) in the society's library? Do they know that the ultimate in female packaging, the bra, was the work of a woman and peace activist called Mary Phelps Jacob? Or that it was another woman who told us blondes have more fun? I take my hat off to them, sexists one and all. Except that, being a truly advanced male, I don't own a hat. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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If you want to rebuild Britain, the family is a good place to start

If you want to rebuild Britain, the family is a good place to start - The gaps in the Big Society give Labour a chance to find out what people really want - Is God a Tory? David Cameron must hope so. Last week Eric Pickles invoked the wisdom of Wesley and Wilberforce in a sermon to faith communities. "Is it not the great end of religion… to smooth the asperities of man?" demanded Saint Eric. Alas, only up to a point.

The Community Secretary's wish "to tap into the secular side of your work" provoked some asperity, not to say outrage, among his hosts, the Cinnamon Network of 100 Christian charities. As one organiser says: "That sounds as if he's only after our expertise."

It is easy to see why Mr Pickles covets the 72 million hours devoted to the community by church volunteers each year. This social goldmine, worth over £1 billion in Britain, is even more lucrative in the States, where the policy prophet Robert Putnam claims in his book American Grace that believers are nicer people and better neighbours.

If Britons are more sceptical about the Lord's capacity for marvels – 84 per cent of Americans believe in miracles – they reserve even graver doubts for wonders wrought by government. Mr Cameron is as likely, in many voters' eyes, to conjure loaves and fishes from the ether as to get his Big Society off the ground.

Nothing daunted, the PM is about to share with ministers a much-delayed White Paper promising to give citizens cash budgets to buy health and social care and education. One trouble in a plan aimed at sidelining local authorities is that Mr Cameron's "Big Society Bill" relies on providing bespoke services at pound-store prices.

Any relief for parents of disabled children at being able to pick a school of their choice will be mitigated by cuts in welfare benefits that will, according to the Children's Society, cost some families £1,400 a year. Swimming with dolphins, or whatever Mr Cameron has in mind for gravely ill people seeking a range of options, won't beguile patients sinking with the NHS.

For once, however, the PM is not for U-turning. He has clung to his Big Society vision because he knows that no party can regain trust and rebuild Britain in hard times without the endorsement of family and community. Ed Miliband is equally convinced that the age of top-down politics is dead. Whichever leader more accurately reads the social signals will win the next election.

Mr Cameron has the harder job, with the Tory-supporting ResPublica think tank about to report that parks and Sure Start centres are shutting down, while Mr Miliband has time to engender what he calls "your neighbour is my neighbour" reciprocity. The Labour leader's admiration of Margaret Thatcher centres largely on the long-termism he hopes to emulate through a policy review whose workings, thus far, have been subject to the sort of omerta that makes Cosa Nostra look expansive.

Last week, however, I spent an afternoon with a citizens' jury of mothers convened to finalise the ideas on family that will now go forward for consultation. These women, from a political cross-spectrum, had been asked to bring an object symbolising their daily lives. The most popular were their children's games consoles, symbolising an atomised society, and stories about rising gas and energy prices they had clipped from newspapers.

All the women worked, but many thought they would be better off on benefits. Their yearning to belong to a wider community was shot through with resentment. As Tessa Jowell, who is leading the family policy review, says: "You can't pretend there's no issue about benefit cheats and immigration, when you hear people saying it. You can't disappear into a comfort zone that denies reality."

The reality, for many of the women, was a fraught life without much or any backing from the fathers of their children. Several spoke of unreliable, abusive or manipulative men who contributed money sporadically or not at all. None called for errant fathers to be made social pariahs, as Mr Cameron wishes. Their futures, and their children's, hinged not on headline-grabbing political fantasy but on practical remedies.

Of the ideas they discussed, including community centres for all ages and extra citizenship teaching, the most popular was a scheme to give grandparents the right to take paternity leave to cover for an absent father as well as pay and leave entitlements for those who care full-time for their grandchildren. A "kinship allowance" is now likely to be a key part of Labour's policy.

Family and "communityship", as one mother called it, were central to a wishlist based on an enabling state. These women, with no time or inclination to knit their own version of the Big Society, wanted to put the sprawling families of the 21st century at the heart of civic revival. BritainThinks, the company conducting the research, found that 78 per cent of people prize neighbourhood bonds, but only 28 per cent believe their children and grandchildren will grow up feeling part of their community.

That is where Arnie Graf comes in. Mr Graf, an American who is said to be one of the three best community organisers in the world, has just finished meeting civic leaders and banging on doors on Mr Miliband's behalf. At first, Mr Graf was reluctant to take the assignment suggested by the Labour leader's adviser, Lord Glasman, not least because of a haziness shared by many voters over Mr Miliband. "I had no idea who the guy was," he says.

Mr Graf, briefly a mentor to Barack Obama, was sufficiently impressed by his first meeting to take up an assignment for which he declined a consultant's fee, visiting 14 towns in 17 days and staying in Premier Inns. His instructions from Mr Miliband were, he says: "Take the pulse of the country and be absolutely honest about what you found."

In an hour-long private meeting last Wednesday, Mr Graf reported back. Britain, he told Mr Miliband, felt that Gordon Brown had not done enough to tackle immigration. People were mostly not racist, but they were resentful as well as worried about manufacturing, education and "kids running amok". So far, so obvious. But Mr Graf, whose work including transforming parts of the Baltimore estate where The Wire was filmed, had another message that Mr Cameron might usefully heed.

Graf's law, a political variant of Through the Looking Glass, involves reversing all truisms. Listen to people, not to think tanks. Send special advisers away from Westminster to tap into what's happening on the ground. Heed citizens instead of hectoring them. Forget party interests and trickle-down politics and, most counter-intuitively, stop trying to win votes. As Mr Graf told Mr Miliband at their debriefing: "If you only think about the election treadmill, you're lost."

Mr Cameron's attempt to bombard families with empty powers they do not want is doomed. Whether Mr Miliband can do better remains to be seen, but he at least understands that anyone hoping to lead a country through austerity must speak not only for the people and to the people but with the people. Tomorrow's society will not be made in Whitehall or, as Mr Pickles's foray demonstrated, in heaven. Policy, like charity, begins at home. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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The house that dad built

The house that dad built - Windows that dimmed the light, bedrooms too small to sleep in – Isobel Atkinson’s childhood home was eccentric but enchanting

In the 1930s, when my father became engaged, he bought an acre of land and the stone from two derelict cottages and drew up plans for building our family home.

It wasn't something of which he had any experience, but he was optimistic and undaunted, a practical Yorkshireman. His fiancée lived some distance away in Scotland and was the very opposite of practical, so I think that her input would have been slight.

I have a photograph of my mother, on a visit to the site, nicely dressed, smiling to camera and holding a stone. I suspect that will have been the only stone she ever held.

The house plans were eccentric, the unequal distribution of interior space due to the fact that my father had already bought the matrimonial bed. He had purchased at auction an enormous half-tester with matching sideboard.

This furniture was created from carved wood, reputed to have come from Wakefield Cathedral during the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. The bed had pegged figures that could be lifted from their niches and heavy side curtains. This was the bed in which I was born, the doctor taking the precaution of having the wooden figures taken down before asking my mother to push.

On Sunday mornings my brother and I were allowed to join our parents in their bed and given strict instructions not to wriggle and let in any cold draughts. There was room for the whole family to stretch out in comfort. Because of this bed my parents' bedroom had been designed to be large. Our home, overall, was not. This presented no problem at first, but when my brother grew until his feet touched his bedroom wall the upstairs rooms had to be reconfigured.

The house looked well enough from the outside with its stone walls and leaded windows. These had small diamond-shaped panes that threw only a subdued light into the rooms and were a nightmare to clean. 'Home improvements' were constantly taking place. It was clear that a man had designed the house. The kitchen was not a practical place and after alterations it became even less so.

My father was full of bright ideas. One of these was to have an ironing-board fixed within a cupboard. Open the cupboard door, let down the board, et voilà! This worked well enough until he decided to move the kitchen door a little to the left, in order to give more space for his armchair in a favourite corner of the living-room. Once the door had been moved you could iron or you could go in and out of the kitchen but you couldn't do both because the ironing-board now neatly filled the doorway.

The staircase was ill lit, twisting up with a short flight of steps before each right-angled turn. I took every corner with care for fear of what might be around it. If I could not persuade anyone to accompany me upstairs then I would sing loudly for a bit of false courage and arrive on the landing with only one more turn on the corridor before the safety of my room. No architectural prizes for you, father!

The house was set well back from the road and approached over a long straight driveway, and the gates were usually kept closed to give our dog the freedom to roam the garden. The postman disliked being ominously shadowed up and down this pathway by the doberman and waved his cap to send the dog away.

What a mistake! From then on our postal service became very erratic. When letters did arrive the envelopes often bore the pencilled message, 'Could not deliver, dog out.' I loved the garden and especially the orchard, where the fruit trees were under-planted with hundreds of spring bulbs.

I worried as a child about having to grow up and leave my home, but as a young adult I went without a backward glance. My parents sold the house while I was living elsewhere. I have never been back, but I sometimes wander happily through my childhood home in my dreams, accompanied by my grown-up daughters, who have never been there. There are some places that you never leave. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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