With a gold crown perched jauntily on his head, Britain’s first-ever elected ‘Gypsy King’ takes a bow. Ladislav Stojka, 53, was crowned after thousands of travellers in the UK’s Roma Gypsy community cast their vote in an historic ballot. Mr Stojka, was chosen from 19 candidates by representatives from 10 cities including Bolton, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford and London.

He was given a traditional crown and ‘old sticks,’ but left by sleek limousine rather than horse and cart to attend a celebration party with friends and family in his home city of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

Once Ladislav was officially named the winner, he sat on a throne as Miss Roma 2011, Maria Kalinacoba, 17, of Chatham, Kent placed the crown on his head. His coronation was announced at Peterborough Town Hall where representatives met to cast their block votes from each community during an election which lasted little over an hour.

Around 100 members of the Roma Gypsy community, largely from Czech Republic and Slovakia, attended the inaugural election ceremony.

Pictures published in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Star and the Daily Mirror.

Jason Bye -

Words by Jan Moir. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Daily Mail.

Today, Julia Budworth is in tweedy heather hues, a vision of genteel country living. Her good Spanish loafers march smartly across the pale green carpet in her drawing room, her good, thick hair is curled just so, the pearls at her neck gleam.

‘These?’ she says, giving them a rattle. ‘Oh they are just Woolworths. Nothing fancy, I assure you.’

Fancy pronounced fency. Mrs B’s voice has the cocktail piano rinkle-tinkle of a bygone age, her manners squeak with the varnish of money and breeding.

At the family estate in Suffolk, oils of her ancestors hang above a roaring log fire. On the mantelpiece, alongside a parade of Meissen china, there is a print of the Annigoni portrait of Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, her first cousin and great friend.

‘Oh Debo is furious, too,’ cries Mrs Budworth. ‘She thinks the whole thing is just ghastly.’

Over the last week Mrs Budworth, co-owner of Britain’s oldest women’s weekly, The Lady, has launched a sustained attack on the magazine’s high-profile editor, Rachel Johnson. She has called Rachel vain and snobbish, a self-promoting careerist who is obsessed with penises.

‘God knows where all the penises come from. She never stops, does she?’ cries Mrs B. ‘Penis this, penis that. It is simply extraordinary. Rachel cannot speak about any subjects, whether it is somebody on the moon or Trident, without bringing the conversation back to penises. What is the matter with the girl? Grow up.’

Mrs Budworth’s rage has been on a slow burn since Johnson, the sister of London mayor Boris, was appointed to stop sliding sales at The Lady a year ago.

Mrs Budworth and her son Ben, who is The Lady’s chief executive, chose Rachel from a parade of hopefuls, despite Johnson’s lack of editing experience. The son still supports the editor. The mother wants her out.

‘Recently she said to me, “Oh I know you really only chose me for editor because I came from a famous family.” She actually said that!’ says Mrs B, in a clipped shriek.

‘And I said, wait a moment. Famous family? Do you mind? If you want a famous family, you should try the Mitfords. The Johnsons? I mean, really. I told Debo this. I don’t know how pleased she was, but I was so rattled at the time.’

Debo, the last remaining Mitford sister, has close connections with the magazine. Her father, David Mitford, once worked there as a manager. Debo even recommended Rachel Johnson for The Lady job, a decision she has come to regret.

‘Eugh yes, I know. It’s all very sad,’ says Mrs B.

The magazine was launched in 1885 by Mrs Budworth’s grandfather, the journalist and Conservative politician Thomas Gibson ­Bowles, and has been in fragrant decline for the past 20 years.

Once the go-to publication for gentlewomen who needed a top-drawer nanny or some helpful hints about cob-nut ­collecting, its core market seems to have gone the same way as spats and bustles.

‘Well, they say that the Queen reads The Lady, but whether that is true or not, I don’t know. It does go to Buckingham Palace, of course,’ says Mrs B.

When sales dipped to below 28,000, Rachel Johnson’s brief was to stop the rot,
gently sex up the ­content, increase circulation and raise the profile.

And that’s when the trouble began. First, as part of a relentless publicity drive which seemed to promote Rachel above all else, there was a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary, in which Johnson called The Lady ‘a piddling little magazine that no one reads’.

On camera, she had an argument with Ben; something mother did not approve of.

‘She was immeasurably rude to him. Blasting him down. She flew at him, saying: “Grow a pair of balls. No one wants to read your rubbish newspaper.” Something like that. Why he didn’t just open the door and say “Goodbye Miss Johnson”, I’ll never know.’

This week there was more bad news with the publication of Johnson’s book, A Diary Of The Lady — serialised in the Mail last month — chronicling her first year at the helm of the magazine.

Within the thickets of name drops and wily self-promotion that clot the pages, Rachel turns her guns on Mrs Budworth. There is much mockery of the proprietor’s fears that the button eyes on a teddy bear featured in the magazine could fall off and harm children.

Johnson also writes of an incident when the ‘formidable’ Mrs Budworth ‘stormed’ into her office ‘bellowing’ that she wanted to murder her.

‘When I went in to murder Rachel, it was a joke for heaven’s sake. I wasn’t really planning any injury,’ says Mrs Budworth, who feels aggrieved at being sidelined and ­ridiculed by her brash new editor.

‘I am not the dragon she is portraying me to be. I’m just sticking up for myself a little bit,’ she says.

The two very different worlds of these women collided at Johnson’s book launch, held at The Lady’s pink Georgian offices in central London on Thursday night.

In extraordinary scenes, Mrs ­Budworth held an impromptu press conference in a cupboard under the stairs, briefing journalists against her own editor, while the party roared around her.

Among the smart metropolitan crowd, the publishers of Johnson’s book joked that plastic penises would be packed into the party bags. The Johnson family were there en masse — including father Stanley and brothers Boris and MP Jo — their big white Johnson fists clasped around the free drinks, their big Johnson laughs booming off the Georgian walls.

How galling it must have been for Mrs Budworth, considering that she probably paid for it all: the canapés, the wines — certainly the Johnson’s salary, reputed to be just south of a six-figure sum for a four-day week.

‘That’s about right. And all of it my money. That makes me not very happy. And she can hardly speak to me on the phone; she is always too busy — it’s just these little things. One does feel completely sidelined and trampled over. And I wouldn’t mind if I thought she was doing The Lady a lot of good, but she isn’t.’

Well, I venture, Rachel’s book did make me want to go out and buy a copy of The Lady, an impulse hitherto resisted. And Johnson has got sales up 7 per cent and people talking about the magazine.

‘Yes, she has, but they talk in a derogatory way! It’s about clever Rachel battling with fuddy duddy old me. It’s all about the heroine, Ms Johnson, struggling away with the dreadful Mrs Budworth. Bah.

‘I sent her book back to her unread. I would slit my throat before I would buy a copy of it, and my friends feel the same. Would it kill her to be polite instead of rude?’

Well what did the Budworths expect? The Johnsons (family motto Grabitus Freebie Firstus) are notoriously opportunistic and exploitative, with hides thicker than bison pelts. At the buffet table of life, you certainly would never want to be in the queue behind them, unless you were partial to fresh air and crumbs.

As Rachel reports in her book, my Daily Mail colleague Ann Leslie once wrote that the Johnsons are ‘like Hungarians — they enter a revolving door behind you but always come out in front’.

Certainly, the intelligent, amusing, seventy-something woman I have tea with strikes me as a very different person from the bellowing monster Rachel Johnson has portrayed.

‘Oh, you look like a young Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon),’ she says to our photographer, full of twinkling mischief.

And despite the wealth, she has had her share of tragedy. In 1974, her husband was killed in an air crash; leaving her with five sons aged between 20 and eight to bring up.

Ten years later, her eldest son was drowned in a ‘ghastly accident’. Today, two sons are barristers, one works in security and helicopter pilot Ben is running The Lady.

The boys all went to public schools, which, she says, was a terrible drain on the family finances.

‘The two eldest went to Wellington and Gordonstoun, the three youngest went to Harrow.

‘No school was better than another, they were all pretty awful. By the time they got to Harrow, a frightful old drunk was the ­headmaster. That was quite an expensive do.’

Did she never ­consider sending them to state schools instead?

‘Eeurk?’ Mrs Bedworth makes a noise like a strangled pheasant. ‘I don’t think so. At the end of the day there is the old boys’ network, and I think it helps. State schools are a bit up and down.’

The family fortune was left between Julia (two-sevenths) and her brother Tom (five-sevenths). She claims that he’s the real villain of The Lady, a recluse who lives at the top of The Lady building and has been ‘living off’ the money for years, while letting the magazine run down.

He only recently relinquished his hold on the family business, allowing Mrs Budworth — who has been ‘itching’ to get to grips with The Lady for years — to stick her oar in.

And look what happens!

Ironically, Julia and Rachel are both women who have struggled to make their mark in male-dominated families; if only they could understand that they have more in common than they realise.

‘The thing about Rachel is that she has made such a Horlicks of so much that my faith in her is shaken,’ says Mrs B, throwing another log on the fire. ‘It has been quite a year.’

Indeed it has. Can it only be 12 months ago that Rachel Johnson, the 45-year-old author and journalist, was appointed editor of this hitherto unremarkable publication?

‘More hip, less hip replacement,’ she said at the time, nicking a line of Emma Soames’s when she took over Saga magazine. Six months into her editorship, Rachel writes of a lunch with Soames who tells her that The Lady will not be the last thing Rachel edits, just ‘a starter-mag for self’.

A few months later, according to her diary, she is sending in pitches for television shows starring that same self. The message is clear; for Rachel Johnson the mag is a stepping stone.

For Mrs Budworth, it is a lifeline. Rachel wants The Lady to be more like a feminised Spectator — the right-wing polemical magazine — featuring all her smart, metropolitan chums. Mrs Budworth wants it to be a little more like Country Life.

‘Perhaps with some lovely wild flowers on the cover?’ she suggests, more in hope than expectation. She gazes out the drawing room window, her view taking in the rich folds of Suffolk countryside, ­Budworth land as far as the eye can see. The grounds were designed and landscaped by Mrs B herself, and feature a lake she had built where a lone swan now glides across the surface. Back and forth it goes, unperturbed and serene.

In front of the Palladian mansion stand a pair of handsome chestnut trees, while next to the front door Mrs Budworth has planted a ­buddleia to attract butterflies. However, it wasn’t always this perfect. When the Budworth family moved here 42 years ago, there was a ­hideous turquoise swimming pool blocking the bucolic view.

‘Oh it was vile. Vile. Utterly viiiiiiiiiiile,’ says Mrs B, with a shudder. So she got rid of it. ‘I said to ­everyone, “Just leave it to me”,’ she says, ‘and off it went to the rubbish tip.’

Now something else is spoiling her view. Something, or should that be a certain someone else, is blocking out the Budworth ­sunshine, raining on Julie ­Budworth’s parade. How long, I wonder, before the family wrecking ball is called into action once more?

This article originally appeared in the Daily Mail on 3rd October 2010 and can be seen online at:

Julia Budworth hits back: After Boris’s sister boasts of sexing up the most genteel magazine, the owner accuses her of being obsessed with (ahem!) male appendages | Mail Online

Jason Bye -

Words by Louis De Bernieres. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Daily Mail.

The Surrey village where I grew up seemed to breed eccentrics. My boyhood memories are peopled by a parade of them.

We had a neighbour who kept a menagerie in her house and drove round the country lanes with a piebald goat on the back seat of her antique car – a 1927 Swift convertible with a leaking hood, which had lost its wooden dashboard, exposing all the wiring.

Then there was the elderly retired general who, after the death of his wife, abandoned the bothersome habit of wearing clothes and walked around stark naked. I remember, too, a formidable old girl who’d once played cricket for the England women’s team.

Her customary mode of dress was tweed plus fours; she also, if my memory does not deceive me, wore a monocle and smoked a pipe.

She was the sort of woman a decent chap could rub along with; none of that damned female nonsense about headaches and manicures.

She also had a disconcerting habit of shooting squirrels in the woods with a 12 bore shotgun when you were out walking the dog. The shot filtered down through the leaves, pattering like rain.

So many years later, these characters still loom large in my memory when I recall the childhood I spent from the late Fifties to the Seventies in a wonderful, rambling half-tiled house with a large garden and orchard in the village of Hambledon.

I lived there with my father, a leading figure in a children’s charity, my mother and my two sisters.

These days, of course, my former neighbours’ wildly idiosyncratic behaviour would be less tolerated. Our liberties are being eroded by panic and paranoia; our freedoms curtailed by fear that we’ll endanger ourselves or others.

That lady would not be permitted to carry her livestock in the passenger seat; neither would her car be considered roadworthy enough to pass an MoT.

Today, the general would doubtless be forcibly dressed, heavily sedated and incarcerated in an old folks’ home in case he scared the children or harmed himself. And as for the lady cricketer, she would probably get a visit from the firearms officer.

In many ways, this is a shame. I regret the fact that our rural communities have been tidied up, sanitised and made safe. I’m sorry that people aren’t really allowed to behave oddly any more.

The landscape is also more tame and orderly than it was when I was a child. I mourn the passing of cottage gardens, rampant with weeds and colourful perennials.

I miss the towering verges dotted with wild flowers and bright with crimson rosehips, which used to flank every country lane.

Now the hedges are vigorously clipped and pruned, often at the wrong time of year, so the birds don’t have a chance to snaffle the berries that grow in them before they are cut back. They need those berries to get through the winter.

The common at Hambledon used to be covered in waist-high bracken in which we children made dens. Now it’s been planted with heather, which apparently is more ecologically sound, but which is of no use to den builders at all.

When I was a boy, some of the cottages in our village were pretty filthy, chaotic places. Today’s health visitors would have been appalled by their outside lavatories, I’d imagine.

As children, of course, we loved the opportunities we had for traipsing around in the mire, prodding at things with sticks and generally getting filthy.

My little sister and I have fond memories of losing our wellies in a dung-heap that just seemed to suck them off our feet.

Hens pecked, rabbits bred and pigs still occasionally foraged in people’s back gardens. Now coops, sties, hutches and all their attendant muck have been swept away.

They have been replaced by decking, slate chips and potted box-trees beloved of in-coming city dwellers, who are ousting the real country folk from their village homes without even meaning to.

The indigenous rural people can’t afford to live in the communities where they were raised any more: the houses are too expensive and there simply aren’t any jobs.

In the vicinity of the Hambledon of my boyhood, there was a walking stick factory, brickworks and brewery, all with proud traditions of employing locals. Sadly, they have long gone.

So, too, have many of the farms that provided jobs on the land for armies of agricultural workers. Small farms get swallowed up by big ones, and the work is done by contractors.

What’s more, whenever some enterprising soul suggests setting up a business in the countryside, there’s a self-righteous furore on the part of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) brigade.

Of course, we don’t want our lovely rural vistas besmirched by sprawling industrial sites, but if we thought hard about where we were putting them, what would be so wrong with building the odd factory to provide jobs for local people?

The countryside is the ideal location for light industry, and can provide employment for young people who would otherwise migrate to towns. So many of our villages have become dormitories for commuting townies who play no part in country life.

I have a suspicion many of them don’t even like the countryside much. Even as a child, I remember being outraged when a family from London moved into our village and complained about the noise of the cockerels.

We all thought: ‘What the hell are you doing here, then?’

er I left university in London, I travelled widely before settling in the capital. But ten years ago, after my novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had been made into a film, I moved out of the city – where I’d always felt like a visitor rather than a native – and back to the country, my natural milieu.

My home is a Georgian rectory in a Norfolk village and I try to give my two children – Robin, six, and Sophie, two – the sort of upbringing I enjoyed.

I want them to grow up to love their village as much as I loved mine and to enjoy the same freedom and pleasure I got from roaming around unfettered, losing my wellies in those dung-heaps and building dens in the bracken.

I am desperately anxious to give them a training in having fun outside. We go out for walks together – fresh air and sunlight are infallible cures for unhappiness – and search for bugs and identify wild flowers. (Robin already knows that ladybirds have exoskeletons and a combined thorax and abdomen).

I’d like the children to learn about the practicalities of rural life, too, so I am trying to get them interested in the idea of working with their hands. Sophie bangs nails into bits of wood with a tiny hammer.

Robin bangs nails into a piece of wood with a slightly bigger hammer, and is just old enough to begin to be helpful with such things as putting up fences. I feel guilty when they bang their thumbs, but you have to start somewhere.

I’m guilty of letting Sophie jump into my arms from the nappy changing table, which doubtless would appal the health-and-safety brigade, but she is a confident little thing who already knows how to do a forward roll, and it never goes wrong.

I hate it that so much is prohibited. I detest signs on village greens that say ‘No Fishing’ in the pond or ‘Keep off the Grass’.

I deplore the culture of litigation that has put paid to harmless rural pleasures, such as cheese rolling (has anyone ever been injured by a runaway round of cheddar?). One Hampshire village banned a procession of floats in its annual carnival – participants had to walk – because they were frightened that someone would sue the organisers if they fell off.

I’d love to think that we could keep alive such country customs as dwile flonking. It differs in every village, but near us it was a game in which a rag (the dwile) was soaked in beer and passed round a circle, with everyone saying ‘Flonk’ as they received it.

Someone had to drink a whole chamber pot of beer before it got back to the beginning, and if they didn’t, the rest of the beer was poured over their head.

In another place, it might be a mad, messy and utterly pointless game in which two teams take turns to dance round each other while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked cloth thrown by the non-dancing team. I admire anyone barmy enough to take part in it, and am glad that I don’t have to.

I think we should pay more attention to enjoying and passing on our national folk dances and tales and I think our children should take part, as was once customary in old rural communities. I also approve of singing in pubs.

I love English fiddle music, it’s just as good as Scots or Welsh or Irish, but we’re shamefully unpatriotic and uneducated in our own culture. We never celebrate it, so it’s in danger of being forgotten.

I confess that I like tragic ballads with 22 verses sung without microphones, which is why I abhor the fact that pub landlords have to apply for licences if they want live music.

There are ways of circumventing this stupid law: we should all just get up and stage impromptu singsongs round the piano in the bar – if we’re still lucky enough to live in a village with a pub.

So many have gone the way of village shops and post offices, but if I had my way, every rural community would have two pubs: one a spit-and-sawdust selling warm beer and lousy food and another featuring good food and wine, so that all tastes are catered for.

TV is so bad these days, and computer screens have so lobotomised us, that it might be time to start going out again.

Not enough villages these days are proper communities with a real sense of fellowship and neighbourliness.

Families are scattered and fragmented, there’s little sense of ‘belonging’ and the elderly – who were once cared for by relatives who’d never moved beyond their native village – are shipped off to care homes.

Fortunately for me, my own village has a group of public-spirited residents who organise the social events that keep communities such as ours alive.

When I was a child, we accepted that maypole dancing, flower shows, fetes and harvest suppers were perennial fixtures of the village calendar because everyone shared an enthusiasm for preserving them.

Now there is less continuity, less sense of one generation succeeding the previous one, and less sense that we have a duty to preserve time-honoured country traditions and, just as importantly, invent new ones to pass on. So the village life of my boyhood has all but vanished.

For many people in the past, life was extremely hard, but I am often tempted to look back on it as an idyll. Just as the rural dialects that added linguistic richness to our language have been weathered away by Estuary English, I feel that the countryside has suffered a kind of erosion.

There are still great characters, but fewer of them, and we have become tamer. Everything is more orderly and clean, but we seem to be more dull and predictable.

How wonderful it would be if our grandchildren could look back on us and say that we were quirky eccentrics in the good old traditional style, but I fear they won’t.

Jason Bye -