Osborne’s wife reveals family skeletons

Twenty-five years ago, aged 13, Frances Osborne, the wife of the Tory shadow chancellor, was at home reading a Sunday newspaper serialisation about Kenya's notorious Happy Valley set. She was gripped.

With her sister, paper in hand, she joined her parents at the dining table. "You have to tell them," said her father. Then her mother spoke, revealing that the women in the photo illustrating the article - a beauty in a drop-waisted silk dress stood underneath two giant elephant tusks - was in fact her great grandmother, a woman whose behaviour once scandalised British society.

She was Idina Sackville, daughter of the Earl De La Warr, and the wife of the womanising Earl of Erroll, whose mysterious murder in 1941 was immortalized in the film White Mischief. She was married five times [before the First World War there were only 500 divorces in Britain], and abandoned Osborne's grandfather to live in Africa with Errol. Nancy Mitford depicted her as "The Bolter" in her books The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred.

Her mother, fearing the connection might prove a bad influence on her daughter had sought to keep it a secret, seeing it is a family skeleton best kept in the cupboard - "You don't want to be known as 'the Bolter's' granddaughter?"

However, far from perturbing her, the Tory MP's wife (pictured with her husband) was inspired by her. "I was a clever, swotty girl and Idina gave me the confidence to dare to be something more," Osborne told the Sunday Times. And now she has written a book about Sackville entitled The Bolter.

Her racy reputation was well won. Writes Osborne: "At parties, she would walk into a room, fix her big blue eyes on the man she wanted and, over the course of the evening, pull him into her web."

"I was 13 years old and transfixed. Was this the secret to being irresistible to men, to behave as this woman did? My mother had been right to be cautious: Idina and her blackened reputation glistened before me."

However, the influence did not prove lasting. Far from a "bolter", Frances is happily married with two children of her own.