Dickson Wright feud boils up

The simmering feud between Clarissa Dickson Wright (pictured), who came to fame with her television series Two Fat Ladies, and her sister, Heather Stretton, has flared up again over a claim made by Wright that their father, Arthur Dickson, a distinguished surgeon, was offered a knighthood for performing a colostomy operation on the Queen Mother.

"It is pure nonsense," Stretton tells the Daily Mail. "I am shocked she should suggest my father was offered a knighthood for something he simply did not do. It must be upsetting and embarrassing for the Royal Family for all this to be aired in public. And what is the point of her saying something other than for cheap exposure and publicity for herself?"

Stretton believes that the Queen Mother's operation was in fact carried out by her father's colleague, Horace Evans, later Lord Evans, and is now demanding that her sister formally apologise to the royal family. She adds: "Lord Evans was the Queen Mother's surgeon, not my father, and I shall be writing to Buckingham Palace to apologise for this breach of medical confidentiality.

The two sisters, who have not been on speaking terms since 1980 when they fell out after Clarissa inherited their mother's fortune, clashed last year over Dickson Wright's memoirs, called Spilling the Beans, in which she accused her father of being a brutal and abusive alcoholic. Stretton, 81, claimed this was a fiction, just like the Queen Mother operation story told by Dickson Wright in a recent interview on the BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends.

Stretton says of her father: "He was a great man. He was a general surgeon, although his greatest work was in brain surgery. He was lionised for his work at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington."