'Tricky topic': Lady Kitty Spencer on the thorny issue of inheritance and Althorp

Lady Kitty Spencer has said that attitudes to primogeniture are changing, despite her father’s insistence that she will not inherit Althorp.

Earl Spencer, brother to Diana, Princess of Wales, plans to leave the estate to his son, Louis, who will inherit the title despite having three older sisters.

The eldest is Lady Kitty, 30, who suggested that her father’s decision was out of step with modern thinking.

“Primogeniture can be a tricky topic, because as times are changing, attitudes are as well. We’ve grown up understanding that it’s Louis to inherit, and Louis will do an incredible job,” she told Town & Country magazine.

Lady Kitty’s comments are the latest contribution to the debate over female heirs. In 2011, the 300-year-old rules of succession to the throne were changed to give equal rights to sons and daughters of any future British monarch. Had the first child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge been a girl, she would have grown up to become Queen.

David Cameron, then Prime Minister, said at the time that “the idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter, simply because he is a man, just isn’t acceptable any more”.

Nevertheless, in 2015 Earl Spencer confirmed that he would be sticking with tradition.

“If I chose Kitty it would be against all the tradition that goes with Althorp. It’s just the way it is. I get the problems with it as a concept,” he said.

“I also get the strengths of it having worked to date. It is still intact. If you go around the chateaux of the Loire or whatever, they are empty. Everything gets split equally through the generations and you end up with a beautiful building with one nice tapestry in it. The whole idea of primogeniture was to keep it together.”

Lady Kitty spoke fondly of Althorp, the 90-room house in Northamptonshire that has been the seat of the Spencer family for 19 generations.

“We have such an emotional attachment to Althorp. That’s where we would have our Easter egg hunts and our Christmases; I have my little vegetable patch, I learnt to ride a horse there, I learnt to ride a bike and to rollerblade. It’s so lovely to look back on the history and think everybody else probably learnt to ride a horse there too.”

Critics of the primogeniture system include Lady Kinvara Balfour, who called the system “archaic” and “absolutely mad”, saying it sent a message that “a daughter is a disappointment” and women are second best.

Her mother, Lady Tessa, was the eldest child of the 17th Duke of Norfolk but the title and Arundel Castle in West Sussex went to Lady Tessa’s younger brother.

For the magazine photoshoot, Lady Kitty, a model and ambassador for Dolce & Gabbana, posed in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, rather than Althorp.

She also recalled being thrust into the spotlight when she attended the wedding of her cousin, the Duke of Sussex. Overnight, her Instagram following leapt from 37,000 to half a million.

“I woke up the next day and looked at my phone and thought, ‘Whoops, did I take someone else’s by mistake?’ It was very weird and a little overwhelming.”