Evening Standard

OPINION - Britain's class system is hell for everyone — just ask an aristocrat like Charles Spencer how toxic it is

Source: Dave Benett

The film Saltburn described an aristocratic family in an exquisite home being destroyed by a middle-class demon. How pitiful he was, we thought, to hate such gilded creatures. But they should have looked closer to home.

Lord Spencer has published a memoir — A Very Private School — which tells how . It is a brave thing to do and it is clearly an act of survival. I wonder if he told his parents. I wonder if he told his sister, Princess , who shared the childhood in which their mother Frances left her abusive husband and, due to the testimony of their snobbish grandmother, was denied custody of her children. Spencer says the abuse by a young matron destroyed his early relationships in life — and it destroyed his childhood. Groomed by a female paedophile, he wanted full sex at 12.

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