Lord Monson: ‘I’ve been diagnosed with cancer, and could only have four months left’
Five years ago, Lord Nicholas Monson was told he had 48 hours to live. His heart was failing and he was hooked up to a dialysis machine; a palliative care doctor came to help him on what they referred to as his “journey”. “I was told I was going to die that night,” he says.
By then, death didn’t frighten Monson. In the previous decade he had lost both his sons in desperate circumstances. His eldest, Alexander, was killed by Kenyan police. His youngest, Rupert, died five days after trying to kill himself while in a state of psychosis that, Monson believes, was induced by skunk (a powerful form of cannabis with a high concentration of THC, the psychoactive ingredient). The years had been unimaginably unkind – he had endured what no parent should have to once, let alone twice. Monson closed his eyes and waited for death to come.
“I created for myself, in my mind’s eye, a picture of a boat on a lake. A rowing boat. And there was sun on the water, it was a sheet of shimmering jewels. And the oars were there and all I had to do was to get in the boat. I kept that image with me.”
The following morning, quite unexpectedly, he woke up. The doctors couldn’t understand it. “One said ‘he’s got to be surviving for a reason’,” Monson recalls. Gradually, he improved and was allowed home where he battled exhaustion and a depression which had plagued him ever since Alexander’s death. “I was having, basically, suicidal thoughts,” he says. He struggled on, motivated largely by getting justice for Alexander, whose killers were still not behind bars.
Two years after that night in ICU, Monson sat in a courtroom in Mombasa while four men were convicted of manslaughter. It followed a decade-long cover up by Kenyan police, who claimed the 28 year old had died in his cell of a drug overdose in 2012 – despite a toxicology report finding no trace of drugs in his system and clear signs he had been beaten. The battle for justice (which at one point saw Monson himself taken at gunpoint to a Kenyan police cell) had, at times, left him in a “fog of depression”. He told The Telegraph the day after the trial that he had often “yearned for death”. All the while, he was grieving his youngest son, whose death in 2017 he describes as “a horror show”.
In the intervening years, you could only hope Monson, 68, might have found some semblance of peace, and to a certain extent he has. He enjoys a “tender and affectionate” relationship with his Brazilian wife, Silvana, 55. The couple run their country home, Victoria Lodge Spa, in Stratford-upon-Avon, as a guest house. Meanwhile, Monson (who is the 12th Baron Monson of Burton, Lincolnshire) throws his energy into causes he cares about, most recently setting up a charity which sends vehicles to Ukraine.
But two months ago, a doctor delivered some bad news. Monson has an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer. It’s incurable – and his oncologist warns it is likely to spread. His prognosis – anywhere between “four months and four years” – sounds frightening, though that isn’t the adjective he would use.
We meet in the cafe at the Brompton Cemetery in west London, not for any particularly morbid reason, but because it’s near Monson’s London pied-à-terre. Dressed in a thick black coat and hat and walking slowly, he seems weary but impressively cheerful for someone who, as he puts it, has “cancer, heart failure [he has cardiomyopathy], diabetes – just the inevitable disintegration of three score years and ten”.
The cancer is “a bit of a downer”, he says, attributing his health to the “wear and tear” that has come from a life punctuated with loss. His oncologist told him: “you strike me as being depressed”. I said, “If you’d lost two children separately and in tragic circumstances I think you too might be depressed.”
Alexander’s death “affects me every day”, he says. “I have vivid dreams of him, more than ten years on. I’m with him, I’m talking with him as a child. So sometimes I feel I’m… not on the edge of madness, but it does stress me.”
As for Rupert: “Witnessing him die in hospital… dreadful,” he says. “Dreadful.”
Rupert died in hospital five days after trying to kill himself near his home in Surrey. He was 21 and had gone from an artistic, athletic boy to becoming tormented by paranoia and hallucinations. “Having watched my son die of it, and seen how it changed his behaviour in the run up to his death, it was quite a shocker,” he says.
In the wake of his death, Monson threw himself into a “war on skunk”. He was shocked by the strength of the mild drug he knew from his younger days that was now being “peddled horrifically” on British streets. He campaigned to see skunk reclassified from a class B to a class A drug, while milder cannabis should, he believed, be decriminalised and properly taxed and regulated.
“If you’re given something which is dodgy you should be able to trace it back to its manufacturers, and also it’s like alcohol – you should know its strength,” he says. Monson was invited to chair a parliamentary discussion on the topic and spoke to then Prime Minister Theresa May, who was “very sympathetic” about his campaign, writing to him to say she shared his concerns.
Eventually, his campaigning on skunk, which he still considers “a pestilential scourge”, fell by the wayside and he has little hope of the Labour government taking on drug reform, pointing out that although there is appetite for addressing smoking, there is less so for drugs. “You can’t have this legal drive against tobacco but then leave out something else that you can smoke,” he says.
Both his sons, and the twin battles to honour their memory, are central to his latest project, a memoir. He began writing it in lockdown with no particular plan to have it published. “I suppose it happens to a lot of people at the end of their life. They think they want to leave a witness statement.”
The book begins with his unlikely start in life (he must be the only hereditary Lord who spent his early years living in a caravan) and details an austere aristocratic childhood. The eldest of three brothers in a family “riven with dysfunction”, he describes his parents as possessing “all the warmth of a fridge”.
“From the age of three, I remember a sense of loss and isolation,” he writes. “It still haunts me.” His father, John, was a crossbench member of the House of Lords, his mother, Emma, was a niece of Dylan Thomas.
The book goes from his time at Eton (of which he considers himself a “survivor”) to the years spent gadding about London, Kenya and New York; becoming Sir John Betjeman’s reading companion, partying with Lou Reed’s muse, stumbling through a rather hapless career (he has been a labourer, a travel salesman, a poet, a journalist) and having as many love affairs as possible.
An excerpt recounting his younger years has a touch of the Jilly Cooper (whom he knew in the 70s) about it. Later, of course, life became a good deal grittier – less about courting the kind of capers that would land you in Tatler, more about the difficult business of being a husband (he has been married three times) and father.
It’s the first part of his memoir, though, with its racy tales and anachronistic turn of phrase, that Monson fears will mean his words never see the light of day. He doesn’t yet have a publisher. “If I went with one of the five major publishers there would inevitably be sensitivity readers, because that’s the way the whole industry is now constructed, so I think I might have to go maverick,” he says. He admits he can’t see “any right-on person under the age of 42 accepting my book and having it on their bookshelf”.
The trouble is, he says, “I don’t tick any of the right boxes.” As well as the story of what happened to his sons, the book features “lots of flirtation”. “I had some fun encounters in Chelsea with people who weren’t necessarily serious about having an emotional relationship,” he says.
He isn’t sure how such antics will go down. “A lot of woke people are quite puritanical. I think much of my life would be an outrage to their sensibilities.” Monson is “old fashioned” and abhors “hideous and dreadful” cancel culture. “I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of expression.”
He is aware that to some he may seem “archaic”, but if sensitivity readers were to trawl through the book he fears there would be nothing left of it. “I would prefer to be my own sensitivity reader and judge. It would be a triumph if I had the woke brigade saying this book must not be bought.”
As the cafe becomes too noisy to hear ourselves we head to his flat nearby. His wife, Silvana, who he has been with for 15 years, is at home. Monson pours himself a cognac. “I think in the earlier days I wouldn’t have gone for a cognac at such an early hour but it has a pleasant warming effect on me,” he says. He doubled his alcohol intake after Alexander died. “Doctors have said to me rather sternly ‘well you shouldn’t drink’. I said how long have I got to live? They said anything between four months to four years. And I think, what’s the point?” he laughs. “I mean I don’t have cognac for breakfast.”
That’s quite a scary date range, isn’t it? “Yes and you want to try and make the most of it while you’re here,” says Monson. “I mean I’m not bothered about death.”
Losing his sons put paid to any fear on that subject. Alexander was, put simply, “the love of my life”, he says. Eldest son to Monson and his first wife, Hilary (to whom he was married for nine years and also shares a daughter, Isabella, 38), Alexander was heir to the Monson title and family estate.
He had moved to Kenya, where his mother and Isabella were both living, months before his death and was out with friends at a beach-front restaurant when he was arrested for allegedly smoking cannabis. Monson was on holiday in Spain when he got a call to say his son had died of an overdose, which he instinctively knew must be false. It would be years before the officers who beat Alexander while in custody, leaving him with blunt head trauma, would be jailed.
In the meantime, Monson made as much noise as he could, both in Kenya and at home to any politician who would listen. “I’ve been told on two or three occasions that I have to be careful if I go back to Kenya,” he says. “There are certain people who are not well disposed towards me in the police and in the government.”
A surprising number of people have asked Monson over the years why he hasn’t taken his own life. “As if that was the next logical thing I should do.” If he did, he said to one man, “it would rather mess up what I’m intending to do, which is to get justice for my son”. In the end, he says, “it was the fight for Alexander that kept me going”.
His relationship with his second son was more complicated, though just as loving. Monson met Rupert’s mother, Karen Green, after his first marriage came to an end. It was a brief relationship and Monson didn’t have a relationship with Rupert until he was 14. “I did everything I could to support him as I got to know him. He was weaved into my will. I took him on holidays and looked after him as best I could. And then this accursed weed got to him. I think he started smoking it at university.”
Like his half brother, Rupert was a talented artist. Monson enjoyed taking him to the Travellers, his gentleman’s club, and getting to know him. Then, in 2016, Rupert became noticeably withdrawn and volatile. He eventually admitted to smoking skunk. By the summer of 2016 he was experiencing hallucinations and in November was sectioned and spent two weeks in a secure unit. The following January, in a dark place again, a psychiatric nurse tried to get Rupert readmitted to hospital but nowhere had a bed for him. Two days later, he was found in woodland close to his grandmother’s home. He died in hospital.
Monson pours himself another cognac and settles into a large golden armchair, the sort you could more easily imagine in a stately home than a modest west London flat. Despite his title (a history master at Eton once called him a “thick Lincolnshire squire”) he is by no means rolling in wealth. The family seat goes back to the 16th century, though his father sold the house – Burton Hall – and the land in 1951. His paternal grandparents attended the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth.
“My grandfather wore his ermine cloak handed down by previous ancestors for occasions such as these (since stolen from the Monson family peg in the House of Lords),” he writes in the book. His father, John, sat in the House of Lords, one of 90 hereditary peers who held onto their seat after Tony Blair’s cull in 1999. His son inherited his title, but not his seat.
“When he died there was a vacancy and apparently it’s bad form to go and put yourself forward straight away,” says Monson, who in the past applied a number of times. “They liked to stick to people with whom they felt comfortable. Maybe I’m a bit of a noisy person.”
His title hasn’t always gone down well with some. In hospital with pneumonia in January, a ward matron looked at his chart and chastised him. “She said to me, ‘I’ve just seen these notes! You’re a Lord!’ And she was really angry about it. [...] She was really quite aggressive to me for the rest of my stay. Her angry Left wing political views. She knew nothing of me.”
He would have liked the chance to pass his title to Isabella, who has three daughters and lives near him in the country. As it is, it will fall to Monson’s younger brother Andrew. “As soon as the constitution was changed so that the eldest female could succeed in the royal family as a prospective new monarch, I thought what’s sourced for the royal goose should be sourced for the noble gander. I had a set-to with the Garter King of Arms about that.”
“We’d never met and he said ‘While I’m very sorry for the loss of your son, I hope you don’t succeed with your campaign to allow women to inherit titles.’ And I said why not? He said the thing is, since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, we’ve lost 100 hereditary peerages – all gone.
“I said surely if it’s alright for the monarchy now to have female monarchs, ignoring the whole primogeniture business, it should be ok for nobility. And he went into an absolute rage and said ‘that was perpetrated upon Her Majesty by David Cameron’.”
His objection? “He felt that hereditary peerages were frankly irrelevant. It was the monarchy that mattered and he thought it was a good thing that 100 hereditary peerages had fallen by the wayside.”
It matters to Monson. “It is an emotional thing. But also it’s in step with the times.”
Since his diagnosis, Monson has been “overwhelmed” by the number of people who have contacted him – “people I haven’t seen in ages”. He and Silvana are staying in London, as it’s closer to his doctors, and he is due to start radiotherapy soon. “I’ve got my club three miles up the road and I have lots of friends. I’m very lucky with friends. Less lucky with family.”
After his sons died, there was a time when he felt “wrung out”. “I couldn’t really see the point of it all.” Now, he has “lots of happy things” in his life. “My wife, we have a very tender and supportive relationship. And I have two dogs – two Yorkshire terriers, Mischief and Pancho.”
How long does he feel he would like to have left? “So long as I have good company and good cheer I’m happy to go on forever. But as soon as that’s absent, I’m happy to go.”