What is it with these peoples' love of nonces? Seems pretty clear that Charles must have been molested as a child if he continues to form such strong attachments to outright predators. Highly disturbing...
The Four Mentors of King Charles November 6, 2025 in Uncategorized by craig
As Godfather to Prince William, heir to the British throne, Prince Charles chose his close friend and adviser Laurens van der Post. A paedophile.
Van der Post raped a 14-year-old girl who had been given into his care for the sea voyage from South Africa to London. He then installed her in a flat in London as his mistress, but abandoned her when she became pregnant age 15 (though he sent a monthly payment). She was not the only one. The victim later stated that van der Post was “sick” and “he knew how to pick his victims”.
In a sycophantic authorised biography of then-Prince Charles written thirty years ago, Jonathan Dimbleby wrote that “for Prince Charles there was a missing dimension”, that he felt his life lacked a spiritual awareness. At age 25 Charles sought out Van der Post after reading his books, and Van der Post became his spiritual Guru. Charles continually sought his advice and absorbed his mystic teachings. Not only is Van der Post William’s Godfather, he gave marriage counselling to Charles and Diana and was a frequent guest at Highgrove, Sandringham and Balmoral. On his death Charles initiated the Van der Post Memorial Lectures, held inside St James’s Palace.
There is a question which will run throughout this article, which is how much did people know? In the 1970s and 1980s it was not public knowledge that Van der Post was a paedophile. But then Charles was not the public. Then as now, if somebody becomes very close to the heir to the throne with frequent access to Royal palaces, they are going to be under close investigation by the security services.
I find it wildly improbable that the security services did not find out about Van der Post’s predilection for young girls and that he had been paying the expenses of an illegitimate daughter originally fathered on a young teenage mother. There is also the question of Van der Post’s wider lies. It is possibly neither here nor there that in fact Van der Post had only ever spent a fortnight with The Bushmen of the Kalahari when he penned his famous book, full of lies and plagiarism.
But that he was actually a Lieutenant (and at times acting Captain) rather than a Lieutenant Colonel as he claimed, would have been instantly discovered. It is worth noting here that Van der Post’s famous military memoir, which became the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence starring David Bowie, was massively embellished, not just in terms of his rank.
The Royalist defence of Charles’ associations rests, rather peculiarly, on the claim that any huckster and paedophile can just get entry to the Palace inner circle without any checks. That is just not true. What appears to be true is that paedophilia was treated as a peccadillo.
Before Van der Post, the man credited by all biographers as the greatest influence in shaping Charles’ character was his great uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Born in Austria as Prince Louis of Battenberg, Charles can hardly be blamed for Mountbatten, who was thrust upon him as a child.
I hope not too literally.
Mountbatten was a paedophile, which was an open secret in upper class society – including the diplomatic service – long before his death. He benefited from the lifetime protection of the inner Royal circle, which was absolute in his lifetime. It has only become mainstream acknowledged in the past very few years.
That is deliberately phrased as “acknowledged”, not “knowledge” – there was not a Fleet Street Editor in 50 years who did not know; they just did not publish it. Mountbatten’s paedophilia was fuelled by his access to underprivileged children, from New Delhi to Rabat to Kincora Boy’s Home.
Mountbatten spent more time with Charles in his childhood and early adulthood than Charles’ own parents did, including encouraging and coaching him to have as much sex with as many “non-marriageable” girls as possible, and providing a venue for it in his homes. After he died Charles said, “Life will never be the same now that he is gone”. It is not a stretch to think that Van der Post – whom he first met four years before Mountbatten’s death – filled the emotional void.
A 1944 FBI dossier described Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for small boys”. This was two years before his appointment as Viceroy of India, where the open debauchery of the Mountbattens was an open secret in high-level Indian society.
It is worth noting that in this period his military aide-de-camp was one Willie McRae. I have always believed that the murder of McRae by the British state was related to his knowledge of Mountbatten and elite paedophile rings: in this context McRae’s ties with Irish Nationalists may be relevant, as they assassinated Mountbatten over the abuse at Kincora.
In Mountbatten’s case there is no doubt at all that the security services knew all about his paedophilia, and covered for him.
So at the death of van der Post in 1996, Charles had lost two men he viewed, exclusively, as guides and spiritual mentors, and from whom he took the most intimate personal advice. There is nobody else who fits this description. Both were extremely vicious and calculating paedophiles, shielded by class privilege from the consequences. So, in 1996, to whom did Charles turn as his new “mentor”?
Jimmy Savile was introduced to a 17-year-old Charles in 1966 by Mountbatten, who vouched for him. The official story is that Mountbatten had met Savile through military veteran fundraising.
You can believe that was the primary shared interest of two prolific paedophiles, if you so please.
Savile cultivated the relationship long-term, and by the 1980s was corresponding assiduously with Charles, which continued for over 20 years. Savile was yet another person to whom Charles turned for marriage counselling. In scores of letters, it is always Charles seeking Savile’s advice and adulating him. There is no record of Charles using the word “mentor” to describe his relationship with Savile, but Diana literally stated that Savile was a “sort of mentor” to Charles.
I presume I do not have to explain that Savile was throughout this period one of the most prolific paedophiles in British history. It is widely believed the royal cachet helped to protect him from prosecution. A huge amount was known to the police, to BBC managers and to various other branches of the British establishment, but Savile was untouchable.
In 2000 Charles constructed a chapel at his home at Highgrove, and a stained glass window in it commemorates Laurens van der Post. Before that window, Charles kneeled for long prayer vigils with his new spiritual guide, Bishop Peter Ball – who was also a friend of Jimmy Savile. It was Savile who introduced Ball to Charles.
Rather like Epstein, Ball was a known paedophile who had got off the first time without incarceration. He had, in 1993, accepted a police caution for a ceremony in which he had forced a 17-year-old novitiate, Neil Todd, to kneel naked in the snow for hours, whipped him, and then forced him to perform a sex act. The police also investigated at that time numerous other allegations, including two very similar ones.
The decision to caution was taken on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. As the Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse Report 2022 primly noted (p.378):
The first report on the Anglican Church investigation – The Anglican Church Case Studies 1. The Diocese of Chichester 2. The Response to Allegations Against Peter Ball Investigation Report – was published in May 2019. It considered the Diocese of Chichester, where there were multiple allegations of child sexual abuse, and whether there were inappropriate attempts by people of prominence to interfere in the criminal justice process after Bishop Peter Ball was first accused of child sexual offences.
I cannot, though, identify the passage referred to of the Diocese of Chichester Report.
Yet immediately after this, and for the next 17 years, Charles provided Ball with rather splendid rent-free accommodation on Charles’ estate. Ball was suspended by the Church of England as a priest and, astonishingly, Charles asked him to officiate at services and perform the Eucharist at his personal chapel in Highgrove, as reported in the Church Times. Ball was frequently in his company and was a personal guest at Charles’ 2005 wedding to Camilla.
In 2015, Charles gifted Ball £20,000. This was said to be simply a friendly gesture – exactly why is unclear. Charles is very definitely not known for personal generosity.
In 2015, Bishop Ball was finally convicted of 12 horrific instances of sexual abuse of boys and young men, all under the guise of religious ritual. Prince Charles put out a public denial that he had interfered in the 1993 decision not to prosecute. My surmise is that he had not done so directly, but rather let it be known through others. That is how it works.
The BBC actually reported that:
Ball’s court case heard that a member of the royal family – who has never been named – was among a host of public figures who supported him when he avoided charges in 1993.
The article goes on to carry this extremely over-specific and narrow denial from the Crown Prosecution Service:
The Crown Prosecution Service has publicly stated that it had neither received nor seen any correspondence from a member of the Royal Family when Ball was under investigation in 1992–93.
Note this very deliberately does not rule out a word in the ear at a function, a phone call, or – as it would be done – getting a friend known to be close to Charles to give the message.
Charles in fact in 1997, two years after his police caution, told Ball that he would directly intervene against Ball victim Neil Todd. “I will see off this horrible man if he tries anything again,” Charles wrote to Ball.
Todd did not live to see Ball ultimately convicted. He committed suicide in 2012. This was convenient for Ball, but there were plenty of other victims who testified in 2015.
I have no doubt the Royal Family will have known about Uncle Louis’s sins – he had an official entourage and was plugged in to the system. The immediate civil servants and close protection officers always know everything. I have already explained why I do not believe van der Post’s paedophilia was unknown. That goes double for Savile – about whom authorities had a huge amount of knowledge, but whose royal connections were a key part of his protection.
While there is no doubt whatsoever Charles knew about Bishop Peter Ball, Ball’s royal circle protection appears to have broken the surface.
To the best of my knowledge and belief, I do not know any paedophiles – but none of us can be absolutely certain we do not. Of one thing, however, I feel extremely confident. The four most-valued advisers in my life, the people whose advice I have most craved and to whom I have turned in times of crisis, are not all paedophiles. I should be astonished if any of them were.
You just can’t have your four closest non-official life guides as paedophiles by accident. You just can’t. It has been put to me that Charles, by nature of his role, knows vastly more people than ordinary folk. That may or may not be true (there is a counter-argument about privilege and protection). But it if were true, it does not improve things. If there is a much larger-than-normal pool from whom Charles could have chosen, it makes it even weirder he chose four prolific paedophiles.
To be clear, prolific paedophilia is extremely abnormal behaviour.
What I do not understand is why paedophilia appears so prevalent and attractive to politicians and the ruling class. People who have much more power and wealth than the rest of us, have the ability (rightly or wrongly) to get attractive adult consenting partners more easily. So why do they, apparently in disproportionate numbers, seek to prey on the young and defenceless?
It is more than time we got rid of the Medieval system of monarchy. That will not solve the corruption of corporate interests controlling the state, or redress the appalling inequality of wealth. It will not even do much to end elite class paedophilia. But as one clear demonstration of the rotten nature of British society, the tale of the King’s four paedophile mentors is extremely instructive.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Have read quite a few of his books and was impressed with his ability to tell an evocative story. Now I feel like a sucker, since it turns out he was bullsh!tting about nearly everything. And having sex with 14 year olds, jesus christ... Might be time to throw them out. Murray's links below.
He was a knight of the realm, a friend of both Margaret Thatcher and the Prince of Wales, and a man known to have sexually abused a girl of 14. No, I am not referring to the late Sir Jimmy Savile, although he ticks all three boxes, but to Sir Laurens van der Post.
The reputation of this mendacious guru has miraculously survived the devastating exposé it received 11 years ago in an authorised biography written by J.D.F. Jones. Well, perhaps not so ‘miraculously’, given the sedulous attention his disciples have paid to burnishing his tarnished image.
Look him up on Wikipedia today and here is how the laudatory entry about him is headed: “Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE (13 December 1906 – 16 December 1996) was a 20th-century Afrikaner author, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist.”
Not a word there about the seamier side to his life which, most monstrously, featured his fathering a child with a girl who had been entrusted into his care on a trip from South Africa to England by her parents, only to be seduced at sea and then set up in London as his mistress in a bed-sitter in Sloane Square, conveniently handy for his marital home. He was in his mid-forties. The product of this union was disowned by her father. Her mother commented years later that Van der Post was “sick” and that “he knew how to pick his victims”. Sound familiar?
Only at the end of the Wikipedia entry under the heading ‘Posthumous Controversy’ does one read: “After his death a number of writers questioned the accuracy of Van der Post’s claims about his life. It was revealed that in 1952 he had fathered a child with a 14-year-old girl who had been under his care during a sea voyage to England from South Africa. His reputation as a ‘modern sage’ and ‘guru’ was questioned, and journalists opened a floodgate of examples of how Van der Post had sometimes embellished the truth in his memoirs and travel books. These and other facts were brought together in J.D.F. Jones’s Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post (2001), an authorised but for the most part hostile biography.”
The description ‘hostile biography’ is as carefully nuanced as ‘sometimes embellished’ (for which read ‘lied’). It would seem to suggest that Jones had set out deliberately to besmirch his subject. But it was not like that at all.
Jones, who died three years ago, was a distinguished writer and journalist, who was successively foreign editor, managing editor and southern Africa editor of the Financial Times. Asked by Van der Post’s family to write his biography, he began his task an ardent admirer of his subject.
I interviewed him some years after the book’s publication, when it was attacked by Christopher Booker in an entry on Van der Post he wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography. (As a dedicated disciple of Van der Post, he was not, you might think, the ideal person to supply a dispassionate assessment of his subject.) Jones told me: “When the book came out, the family were extremely upset. They insisted they were going to expose it as a malicious tissue of lies.
“They were shocked to discover they had a Hottentot ancestor — the first black woman to legally marry a white man in South Africa — who ended up an alcoholic prostitute. I lost friends because Laurens’s admirers and followers found it hard to accept the facts that I laid out. Booker writes that my book was ‘often inaccurate’ — a remark that is probably actionable. For all that he and the family have said, I am still waiting for a single error to be identified.
“I had three research assistants. After the first few weeks of work, we looked at each other and said: ‘There’s something wrong here.’.
“What we four had all discovered was that not a single word Laurens wrote or spoke could be believed. He was a total fantasist. I remember one researcher poring over military records and saying, ‘What is this about him being a Lieutenant Colonel? He was an acting captain.’.”
Among other of his spectacular lies was his career-moulding claim to have lived on intimate terms with the Kalahari Bushmen. “How long was he with them?” Jones asks. “From the inadequate diaries we have, it cannot have been longer than a fortnight. On this flimsy foundation, and an inevitably distant acquaintance with no more than 30 bushmen, Laurens would go on to build a substantial reputation.”
Then there were the friendships he boasted with, among others, Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame), D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Martin Luther King. Lies, all lies.
And that long-vaunted association with Carl Gustav Jung, deliciously suggestive of intellectual equality on both sides, turned out to have been a relationship whose intimacy was very largely of his invention.
As I said when first writing about Jones’s biography: “As one reads on, bug-eyed at [the book’s] revelations, one quickly realises that a superfluous ‘v’ appears to have crept into its title: Storyteller: The Many Lives [sic] of Laurens van de Post.” Strangely, it was as late as page 359 that Jones actually bit the bullet and called his subject “a compulsive liar”.
That he was such was acknowledged by Victoria Glendinning, in her 2006 biography of Leonard Woolf, an early publisher of Van der Post’s work. She called him a “fantasist and mythomane” and referred to his private life as “coarse and lascivious to the point of criminality”.
Her verdict is a sound one. At a time when much is being said concerning the need to rescind Jimmy Savile’s knighthood, here surely is another man undeserving of so signal a mark of merit.
Secret life of royal guru revealed This article is more than 24 years old Laurens van der Post, revered by Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles, hid the fact he fathered a child with a girl of 14 Vanessa Thorpe, arts correspondent Sun 4 Feb 2001 01.41 GMT
The official biography of Sir Laurens van der Post, the South African writer and late spiritual mentor of Prince Charles, is to reveal a life full of political intrigue, colourful fantasy - and the growing fear of scandal.
The book, due to be published this autumn, draws from the writer's personal archive for the first time, uncovering facts that he was determined not to see in print in his lifetime.
Documents found by the biographer J D F Jones, have confirmed allegations that Van der Post had a secret child after an illicit affair with a 14-year-old girl. After the author's death in 1996, Cari Mostert sensationally came forward to claim she was his illegitimate daughter and that her underage mother had been seduced during a boat trip to England.
'It was one of the great nightmares of his life that this would come out,' Jones told The Observer last week. 'But I cannot write a proper life story without examining it.'
His researches have also uncovered the fact that Van der Post spoke regularly to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands conflict. 'He certainly called her up right throughout the war, the understanding being that he would rally her whenever he could. He was very close to her for a long period,' said Jones.
The news that Van der Post guided the Prime Minister through some of her most difficult decisions during the campaign is a surprise to the writer's legally recognised daughter, the executor of his estate, Lucia Van der Post.
'I knew they were good friends and that he had helped in the Lancaster House negotiations with Zimbabwe in 1981, but I had no idea that he had continued to talk to her so regularly,' she said.
A spokesman for Thatcher confirmed Jones's findings. 'They certainly spoke to each other a lot in private. He was a moral support to her, even though he did not know anything specifically about the South Atlantic. It was really all about their friendship. She had a lot of respect for a great many things he had to say.'
Jones was appointed biographer by Lucia Van der Post after consultation with her father's friends, but she stressed last week that she had no powers of censorship over the text, nor would she want them.
'I am sure the text will include many things I didn't know about,' she said. 'As to his affairs, well, I have no doubt, living to the age he did, that my father led an extraordinary life.'
Three days after he died at the age of 90, rumours surfaced of his affair with a 14-year-old girl, and his alleged rejection of their child.
Mostert claimed her mother had been seduced by Van der Post, who was more than three times her age, after she had been entrusted to his care. She described the explorer's tears when they first met, and alleged he had refused to answer her letters.
The affair took place five years after Van der Post's second marriage to Ingaret Giffard in 1949, when the girl, Bonnie, travelled to London to become a ballet dancer. Only a few weeks after her arrival in England she went back, pregnant, to South Africa. Jones's research has shown the writer did, however, make financial provision for the baby, arranging to support her until she was 18 by secret deed of covenant.
Van der Post was a fantasist who embellished the facts of his life. 'I don't really know why he did it,' said Jones. 'It was mainly on questions of his background. He was a great storyteller in every element of his life. He used to say that he was born 1,001 miles away from the sea, but in fact he was born 325 miles from the sea. Fabrication came naturally to him.'
'The Great White Bushman', as Van der Post came to be known, started out as a journalist in Durban and married his first wife, Marjorie Wendt, in 1928. He travelled between Africa and England before writing his first novel, In A Province, in 1934.
During the Second World War he served in Ethiopia, the Western Desert and Burma, before being captured in Java by the Japanese and held for three years. His writings on his captivity were the basis of the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence .
After the war, Van der Post worked with Lord Mountbatten and left the Army as a colonel, with an OBE and a CBE.
In the 1950s his literary reputation was secured with the novels The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Heart of the Hunter. He became friends with statesmen, thinkers and business moguls, including Sir James Goldsmith and the founding father of psychotherapy, Carl Gustav Jung. He was asked to become godfather to Prince William.
'It is an extraordinary story,' says Jones. 'He did not have a drop of British blood in his veins and yet he grew up to become an adviser to the heir to the throne and a Prime Minister.'Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: Laurens van der Pump (with thanks to Private Eye when it was good)
Posted by Keith-264 on November 9, 2025, 8:07 pm, in reply to "Laurens van der Post"
I remember him as an occasional name on the telly but was never interested in his 'work'. Being known as an intimate of Charlie big ears was a turn off.The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
Re: Laurens van der Pump (with thanks to Private Eye when it was good)
I think I read 'The Seed & The Sower' (POW 'memoirs' and lots of dark night of the soul god stuff) after randomly picking it off someone's bookshelf, so in my defense it was a while before I found out he was so in-step with the UK establishment. Thatcher too, FFS! He wrote a book about Russia after travels there, 'Journey into Russia', which I thought was decent apart from some dodgy generalisations about a Russian 'character' which supposedly led them to put up with authority and despotism. Right, all 150m of them, encompassing all the different ethnicities and religions, have exactly the same outlook & attitude... Probably half of it was made up or exaggerated based on a 24hr soujourn.
Apart from when they're having revolutions and civil wars ;O) In those days reading the Sunday Times before the Australian got hold of it, then the Independent on Sunday. I used to read the Literary Review and the TLS too and got a skimming of what the bien pensants were up to. These days I look at the free bits of the LRB online and that's it.The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
Punished myself by watching this so you don't have to:
He doesn't ask her a single challenging question. A bit of cod psychology asking about her first childhood memories and tying in the sense of 'wonder' little Maggie got from looking at the world outside her pram to her later forays into chemistry and working in a plastics factory. He lets her bang on about a supposed meritocracy which allowed her to rise through the ranks without pointing out that this is an impossibility for most people, or that her policies of attacking the working class & unions made it less likely that most people would be able to claw themselves out of the hole she shoved them into. And then there's a bunch of jingoistic sh!te about the Falklands, the heavy burden of responsibility, knowing that young people will die because of your orders, the difficulty of switching from a war footing to peacetime decision-making. Not a single question about whether the war was justified, or whether she only launched it to save her career. Otherwise he gets a tour of Downing Street, all the 'pictures' Thatcher had put up (they looked like 'paintings' to me, but what do I know...), a few silverware trinkets, a few historic figures looking down from portraits and busts.
Nothing punctured the robotic insincerity and alienated verbiage she was spouting, and he followed her around like a dutiful servant, not a word out of place. Another one of the 'wets' that Thatcher liked to surround herself with.
on November 9, 2025, 5:40 pm