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How Lucan’s made peace chum Sykes

HTV PRESENTER Anthea Turner is taking unusual steps to keep in shape ahead of her wedding to socialite Mark Armstrong in Italy. ‘I wear weights around the house,’ the former Blue Peter star, 62, tells me at the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘I’ve 2kg weights around my ankles and a 5kg vest to make myself work harder.’

E WAS the last of the Chelsea Set of outrageous toffs who scandalised late 1950s London with their gambling and hard-partying.

But perhaps the most surprising revelation about Mark Sykes, who has died suddenly aged 84, is that he was reconciled with his family. ‘I actually spoke to him on the day he died,’ his eldest son, Tom, tells me. ‘A great consolation.’

Sykes is said to have died in the street behind Westminster Abbey while on his way to a lunch.

A gambling pal of Lord Lucan, the aristocratic charmer was extradited to Australia, convicted of blackmail at the Old Bailey and cold-shouldered by all six of his children, including his second daughter, bestselling author ‘Plum’ Sykes.

His reconciliation with them seemed inconceivable for decades following Sykes’s desertion of his second wife, former model Valerie Goad, whom he left near-destitute and caring for Tom and his siblings.

So deep were the wounds that when Plum held the London launch party for her hit debut novel, Bergdorf Blondes, at Annabel’s nightclub in Mayfair, she pointedly did not invite her father.

Indeed, by then it was accepted that Plum — who’d been lured to New York to work on American Vogue by its editor, the formidable Anna Wintour — had ‘airbrushed him out of her personal history’.

Relationships with the wider family were scarcely better — including those with his cousin, dandy baronet Sir Tatton Sykes, who inherited the family seat, the magnificent Sledmere House in Yorkshire.

Good looking, engaging and ‘no fool’, as one acquaintance puts it, Oxford-educated Sykes was engaged to Viscount Portman’s niece, Suna Portman, and was briefly wed to Australian model Helen Homewood, who posed for celebrated photographer Helmut Newton.

After his divorce from Goad, he married Alexandra ‘Sandy’ Sotomayor, a spirited Ecuadorian who died two years ago from Covid.

Sykes, who was banned from driving and acquitted of causing grievous bodily harm to a London cab driver, got away with an insurance fraud in 1960 involving a Rubens, a Renoir and other significant artworks.

His co-conspirators were Peter Scaramanga, an Old Harrovian, and Eton-educated pornographer and novelist Robin Cook, who confessed decades later: ‘It was a scam.’ The paintings were never recovered.

Even when, in 1979, finally convicted — of attempting to blackmail an Iranian out of £250,000 (£1 million today) — Sykes received only a 12-month suspended sentence.

His funeral was held in the Catholic Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. ‘It was a beautiful service,’ Tom tells me.

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