09-05-2025
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Celebrated actress reveals 'furious' row at palace party given by King Charles and Queen Camilla
Buckingham Palace has not seen anything like it since Lady Susan Hussey's unfortunate contretemps with campaigner Ngozi Fulani in 2022.
I hear that Dame Sheila Hancock got involved in a heated argument during a reception at the palace.
So furious did the confrontation become that a fellow party-goer had to intervene to calm down the Olivier Award-winning actress.
The row is thought to have taken place at a party for guests who had attended the Christmas carol service at Westminster Abbey last December organised by the Princess of Wales.
'I was at a Christmas party given by the King and Queen when I inappropriately got into a furious political argument with someone important,' confirms Dame Sheila.
The widow of late Inspector Morse star John Thaw does not disclose the identity of the 'important' fellow guest or the cause of their dispute.
However, she confirms that a bystander intervened to defuse the situation.
'Trying to keep the peace was a good-looking gentleman who stayed with me when my angry antagonist stalked off,' she writes in Prospect magazine.
Dame Sheila's mood then worsened when she spotted Justin Welby, who had resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury a few weeks earlier.
'To my horror, I could see that Justin Welby – who the day before had made an unforgivably light-hearted speech in the House of Lords about his crass inadequacy in dealing with abuse in the Church – was about to approach me,' she says.
'Fearful of irretrievably blotting my royal copy book with a second confrontation, I made my poor new friend block the way between me and the holy man.'
The actress, 92, is no stranger to hostile encounters.
In 2013, her co-star in a West End show, Keeley Hawes, dropped out of the production after reportedly clashing repeatedly with Dame Sheila.
One source described it in The Mail on Sunday as a 'battle between two divas', with one particularly heated argument allegedly leading to an 'arm-grabbing' incident.
Lady Susan Hussey, a loyal aide of the late Queen Elizabeth, was forced to step down from her royal duties after she inadvertently offended domestic abuse campaigner Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace reception.
