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Not the Churchills' finest hour

Last updated at 22:36 13 October 2006

Arabella Churchill was the apple of her grandfather Winston's eye. Now she lives the life of an eccentric hippy...and her son stands accused of running a £5million drugs ring. What would the great man say?

The day was lovely, an emotional mixture of tears and laughter, and for Arabella Churchill it was worth everything to fly to Australia to be at her son Jake Barton's wedding. It was the moment for which Sir Winston Churchill's favourite grandchild had long been waiting — the day that Jake, 33, whom she had cheerfully hauled as a baby through squats and hippie communes, was finally settling down. Arabella remembers waving goodbye to him and "my beautiful new daughter-in-law" Kim as she and her husband drove away from the ocean-side resort of Byron Bay towards Brisbane airport. "The thought of more air travel and jet lag appalled me, but we love Jake and Kim dearly, so Haggis (her second husband, a juggler) and I really felt we had to be at their wedding," she wrote afterwards in a website diary. Perhaps the next piece of family news would be about a baby, her own first grandchild? When important news came, though, it was anything but joyous. Jake's beachside home had been raided by New South Wales police and he was in custody accused of running a £5 million drugs ring. Today, seven months after that happiest of wedding days, Jake is held in Sydney's Parklea prison and Arabella Churchill's brief dynastic contentment has turned to anguish. Next month, Sir Winston's great-grandson goes on trial and faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. "There is nothing I can say about this," says Arabella, 57, who, as a teenager, would sit and talk with her grandfather, holding the great wartime leader's hand. "Nothing at all." Worst of all, for a woman who has devoted much of her life to helping thousands through her Children's World charity (which provides entertainment for children from all backgrounds) is the certain knowledge that, in this grave moment of crisis, her own child is beyond her help. Australian police allege that Jake Barton ran a major drugs syndicate. They say they seized 250,000 Ecstasy tablets and all the paraphernalia of a large-scale drug-producing operating, including 30lb of MDMA, the powder used to make Ecstasy tablets, and two pill presses. So large is the drugs ring police claim to have smashed that a shortage of Ecstasy supplies in Sydney has been noticed and prices have shot up. The problem of being a Churchill is that the name always attracts attention, but no one in Australia knew that Jake was a scion of that remarkable — and, at times, remarkably troubled — family. Jake kept his dynastic connections to himself. Jake's arrest is an unimaginable twist in a saga of disappointment that for decades has pursued the descendants of Britain's most lionised leader. Ever in the shadow of Sir Winston, whatever they have done never seems to be enough for them to feel they live up to him. In particular, the great man's son Randolph — Arabella's father — was one of the most famously unpleasant figures in mid-20th century public life. A man of huge political ambition and enormous alcohol consumption, he stood six times for Parliament without success, each failure making him more generally unpleasant. When he had surgery for a benign tumour, Evelyn Waugh remarked that the surgeon had removed "the only part of Randolph that was not malignant". Arabella's half-brother, Winston, 66, did become an MP but was a politician of only modest achievement. If he did achieve any kind of status it was only, according to Soraya Khashoggi, former wife of billionaire Adnan, in bed. But on one occasion at least, being a Churchill certainly helped him out of a little difficulty. Soraya tells how once, during their five-year affair, they were driving along a freeway in America when she started to remove her clothes. She told him: "The faster you go, the more I'll take off. "In no time at all, Winston was doing 100 miles an hour and I had nothing on — which was when we heard the police siren." The punishment? Just a ticking off after the officer examined his driver's licence and satisfied himself he really had stopped Winston Spencer Churchill. It was the same Winston who created a furore in 1995 by selling the Chartwell Papers, his grandfather's archive, to the nation for £12.5 million, paid for with National Lottery money. Some historians and many of his fellow MPs were outraged because they believed many of the documents should have been the property of the state. As for Arabella, her early years — post-war years when her grandfather was the hero of the free world — were embellished with Churchillian glamour. In America, she met the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Jackie Onassis, she recalled, took "an almost aunt-like interest" in her. On the eve of her wedding in 1972, she bumped into the former American First Lady at the hairdressers. As Arabella has recalled: "She said, 'Darling, I've heard about the wedding. May I go to Tiffany and get you a little box or something?' I said: 'No, no, I have a wedding list at a shop called Kitchens' — and she went and bought the rest of the stuff. "My brother Winston thought I'd gone mad, but I couldn't think what I'd do with a silver box. I was more interested in having a bread board." The Churchill girl who had been Deb of the Year in 1967 and whose lunch date with the then Crown Prince (now King) Carl Gustav of Sweden excited the Swedish media to speculate on her as a future Queen, was marrying a bearded, Scots-born teacher, Jim Barton. Arabella had been under an intense media spotlight after declining to be the Azalea Queen at the annual celebration of one of her grandfather's greatest monuments, Nato. She wrote a pithy letter to the organisers in Norfolk, Virginia, saying that a military organisation using force of arms to impose its view "alarmed and disillusioned" her. In her exasperation about the way the world was going, Arabella was eschewing the conventional gilded Churchillian path through life. She was determined to be herself. One day she just wasn't around any more: she'd slipped away to join a group of hippies. At Glastonbury, as she and others were founding the music festival in which she is still involved, she met Barton, whose father was a headmaster in Bournemouth. Enter Jake, born in 1973, not at Blenheim Palace, seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, where his illustrious great-grandfather was born, but on a sheep farm in Wales which Arabella and Jim were running. Barely a year later, Jim Barton had left and his mother was on her own. An extraordinary, not to say eccentric childhood followed, as Arabella, wracked by periods of depression so familiar among the Churchills, drank, took Valium and consulted a clinical psychologist. By the time Jake was three, his mother had moved into a squat in London's Maida Vale. Ever the organiser, she set up a restaurant in the rooms downstairs, cooking "cheap, wholesome food for my friends". Her friends? These were 200 other fellow-squatters in the run-down neighbourhood. When she learned that the then Greater London Council was evicting her and Jake from the squat, she burst into tears. "Oh Christ, I'm homeless again," she sobbed. "What am I going to do now?" For Jake it was a totally un-Churchillian start in life, but some normality arrived when Arabella's mother June (Randolph's second wife, who was to commit suicide at 58 while suffering from cancer) bought her a house in Kensington. Before long she had let the upper part of the house and was living downstairs with Jake, but spending increasing amounts of time among the hippies in and around Glastonbury. Eventually she moved to the town, sending Jake to St Dunstan's mixed secondary school just behind Glastonbury High Street. He was﹃a bit of a character, a comedian, but with a wise air about him — the kids looked up to him,﹄recalls one of his contemporaries. "I didn't know until afterwards that he was a member of the Churchill family." By now — again through the Glastonbury festival — Arabella had met her second husband, Ian 'Haggis' McLeod, a juggler of some renown and 14 years her junior. They have a daughter, Jessica, 17, who is also being educated locally. For Arabella Churchill, life continues to be rather bohemian, based round the New Age mecca of Glastonbury, in a somewhat dilapidated semi with beautiful views over the hills. But with Haggis and Jess, Gracie the dog and cats Rumple and Badger, her Children's World charity and the Glastonbury festival in which she organises three big performance fields for children, life of late was "absolutely lovely" for Arabella. But then came the news about Jake. "It was," says a family friend, "the most disastrous news she has ever had. "She is speechless with despair. She doesn't know what to think. Deaths in the family, for whatever reason, you come to expect. But not this, not Jake. He's such a lovely boy, and he's always worked hard for a living." Jake, however, has always been a young man without a settled career. At 19, he teamed up with his father, Jim Barton, to form a film company. Three years later, having made no impression on the film world, the company was dissolved. He went to Australia and — encouraged long-distance by Arabella — did a fish-farming course at Launceston University in Tasmania. At the same time, by now in his late 20s, he took out Australian citizenship. After this he moved to Indonesia to work as a pearl farmer. Then he returned to Eastern Australia, surfed, sailed and met Kim. And then, last June, the New South Wales Special Crimes Unit burst in. Jake is charged, together with his associate, New Zealand-born Rees Gerard Woodgate, 42, with supplying a commercial quantity of Ecstasy. The shock waves have reverberated through the widespread Churchill family whose talents through the generations have encompassed everything from soldiering to literature. The family has always had a melancholic side — Sir Winston called it his "black dog" — but is never short of instant, often dark humour. "Well, we've done everything else — so what about drug dealing?" quipped one peripheral family figure yesterday, before adding hastily: "But I cannot believe that Jake has done these things. It must be a terrible mistake." Next month we’ll find out.

Not the Churchills' finest hour

Arabella Churchill was the apple of her grandfather Winston's eye. Now she lives the life of an eccentric hippy...and her son stands accused of running a £5million drugs ring. What would the great man say?

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