‘My daughters accept that only my son will inherit my 2,000 acre estate'

Telegraph

a day ago

Raymond Asquith, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, has lived many lives. In one, he was the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Moscow head of station who smuggled the Russian double agent Oleg Gordievsky out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car in 1985. 'I'm very glad we pulled it off,' he says. 'The Foreign Office only gave us a 20pc chance of success.'
If Gordievsky had been caught, 'they would have shot him' and a lorry would have been arranged to crash into the Asquiths' car: 'that's how they assassinated a lot of people – after the event, a KGB officer told me [that] would have happened to me.'
But somehow, being Britain's most blue-blooded (former) spy is merely his hinterland. While he's had a role at Mells Manor in Somerset, for the last 14 years he has been at the helm, having officially taken over when his father died in 2011. Mells had belonged to his late grandmother Katharine Asquith, neé Horner's family since 1543.
Lord Oxford has rebuilt the estate team from scratch and set about doing up its 50 cottages, 'bringing them up to a state of furnishing and comfort which is acceptable'. Mells, he says, is 'a very desirable place to move to. I've never sold any land – indeed, I've bought two farms – and I've never sold any cottages, so there's not a big turnover of property.'
The manor house is not open to the public, but the outside can be seen from nearby roads and footpaths. The inside is disarmingly lovely, unsurprisingly packed full of books about Russia, a sketch of wartime prime minister Herbert Asquith by Violet, Duchess of Rutland, hanging in the library, and Mary Queen of Scots' execution veil on display in the next room. Nearby is Henry VIII's charter granting Mells to the Horners for £1,831 – 19 shillings, 11 pence, and a farthing.
Upkeep of such a place could easily be a full-time job, but its custodian has organised Mells in such a way that Lord Oxford is able to maintain his life beyond it and not be there every day. He continues to have business interests – and a flat – in Ukraine, and is an active member of the House of Lords, to which he was elected in 2014 as a Liberal Democrat, and in which he now sits as a crossbencher. His great-grandfather was responsible for ending the Lords' ability to veto bills. 'That was probably a good thing,' he says, 'but to turn out the hereditary peers from the Lords – that's a pity. But I would say that, wouldn't I?'
He hasn't always lived at Mells. His father, Julian 'Trim' Asquith, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, grandson of Herbert Asquith, worked for the colonial service, and the family – his wife Anne Palairet, a former Bletchley girl, and their five children – moved around a lot.
Lord Oxford was born in Libya; before he was 10, his father had had postings in Zanzibar, the West Indies, and the Seychelles. Sent to school in England aged nine, he spent the holidays in a house on the Mells estate with his grandmother Katharine and his aunt Lady Helen Asquith, the big house let to David Barran, chairman of Shell. In 1967, Trim and Anne returned to the UK and settled at Mells, by which time Lord Oxford was at Ampleforth.
Graduating from Balliol College, Oxford University in the early 1970s, he considered becoming a composer, but having married Clare Pollen, the soon-to-be Shakespearean scholar, in 1978, he thought he ought to get a salaried job and applied to the Foreign Office. Soon after, Margaret Thatcher's civil service recruitment freeze was enacted. 'They couldn't take me,' he remembers.
A year later nothing had changed. 'A guy from the Foreign Office said, 'we would have liked to have had you – but you can join our friends, the SIS' he says. He went for an interview. 'I hadn't volunteered for it. I actually intended to join the Foreign Office [rather than this being a euphemism]!' He took the job, since he needed one. 'My father was disappointed. He said, 'you'll never be an ambassador and you'll always have to tell lies'.'
Having passed the SIS induction course, Lord Oxford – then Viscount Asquith – was asked where he'd like to be posted to. He said Moscow. 'They said, 'nothing ever happens in Moscow'. Sure enough, it didn't in those days, because the KGB was so efficient,' he says. He stuck with his decision nevertheless. 'It was quite a good choice. I've not regretted a single thing.'
Life in the Soviet Union wasn't easy. For years, the Asquiths and their children were subject to constant KGB surveillance. 'Everything was monitored. When my wife and I wanted to communicate anything, we had to write it to each other as notes and then put it down the loo,' he recalls.
Their flat was searched daily, either by their Russian nanny or by KGB agents she let in. 'It was quite wearing, psychologically.' One day, they were disagreeing about where they had planned to go for a picnic. He asked the ceiling, 'Well, where did we agree?' A note came under the door with the answer.
On the whole, the KGB did not like to be noticed. 'The one thing you don't signal to the KGB is that you know they're there, because they get very ratty and feel that they're unprofessional,' he says. He has years' worth of extraordinary stories. One day, while out cross-country skiing, he got stuck in a rut and went straight into the tree in front of him. 'Hiding in it was a KGB photographer taking photographs of me. He thought I'd done it deliberately and was furious!'
Is it true that once a spook, always a spook? 'We don't ever call them spooks,' he says. 'People say you never retire, but that's nonsense. I took the decision that when I left SIS [in 1997] I would leave it. It's a mistake after you've resigned to hang around pretending to be a historian or a librarian.'
As head of the family, is Lord Oxford the keeper of the Asquith memory? 'Certainly I'm a keeper of the Horner memory – most of the Asquith stuff has gone to the Bodleian.' He talks lovingly of his great uncle Edward Horner, killed in 1917 at Cambrai, of whom a statue by Sir Alfred Munnings stands in St Andrew's Church, Mells, on top of a stone plinth by Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Likewise of his 'extraordinary' late grandfather Raymond Asquith, who was killed at the Somme in 1916. 'He was so self-deprecating, he never showed off his brilliance,' he says. 'It may have been because of his mother's death [when he was young] but he just didn't really have an enormous amount of self-confidence. That's what most people don't really see in him.'
In time, Mells will become the responsibility of Lord Oxford's son Mark, Viscount Asquith. His four daughters 'have accepted that the son will inherit the land,' he says. 'I run two businesses which they will own between them – they are provided for.'
The vineyard he has planted on the estate will be theirs too. 'I hope they will feel that they still have an interest in Mells and that it's not going to be entirely male primogeniture that dominates,' he says.