All three are now signed to Storm Model Management – their protective agent hovers close by – and are living mostly in London. They have their mother’s huge, vulnerable eyes and fine bone structure, and the Spencer fair, champagne colouring; they are funny, frank and charming; and most noticeably of all, there is a touchingly iron-strong sisterly bond between the platinum blondes. They are very close, with Kitty, 34, the ‘calm, feminine’ (according to Eliza), grown-up one, and the twins, 32, more tomboyishly active, finishing each other’s sentences. They also have
a younger brother, Louis, now 30, who went to Edinburgh University and will inherit Althorp. He is now a professional actor under the name Louis Lyons.
As English as they are by birth, they have been nurtured by the South African ecosystem, raised in the lush winelands of Constantia, Cape Town, in tennis-and-pool breezy style, with forest hikes, camping trips and education at Reddam House, a mixed private day school in the suburb. Their parents – Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl, and his first wife, model Victoria Lockwood – moved there in 1995 when Kitty was four and the twins were two or three. By 1997, their parents were divorced, their mother battling drink, drugs and anorexia. Victoria then trained as a counsellor, remarried, had the sisters’ beloved ‘baby brother’ Samuel, now 21, and later nightmarishly divorced her second husband, the businessman and former model Jonathan Aitken. You’d have to be allergic to news to have missed what happened next to their father, a distinguished historian. After two subsequent marriages – to Oxford friend Caroline ‘Pidge’ Freud (divorced from Matthew) and Canadian Karen Gordon – and three more children (Ned and Lara with Caroline, Charlotte with Karen), he has, after writing a bestselling memoir about his abuse at prep school, settled, if that is the right word, with the archaeologist and co-host of his podcast The Rabbit Hole Detectives, Dr Cat Jarman. This turned spectacularly messy, with a lawsuit running at the time of going to press. (Jarman has accused Karen of breaching her medical privacy by discussing her MS diagnosis. The countess denies any liability, reportedly claiming that any reference to Jarman’s condition ‘was entirely legitimate and justified’.) Perhaps Jarman, a 42-year-old Norwegian, will finally be the one to tame Spencer, given her expertise in Viking impulsivity.
The previous generation of Spencers was equally dramatic. The girls’ grandmother Frances ran off with wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd; their grandfather remarried and after he died, Charles, with Princess Diana’s help, memorably threw their stepmother Raine Spencer’s belongings in black bin bags down the stairs at Althorp, the Palladian family seat (with Tudor origins) set in 13,000 acres of Northamptonshire.