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As Guppy beats up the Earl Spencer over an alleged pass at his wife, who used to run an escort agency, Boris Johnson claims that these self-styled superior beings live by a 'Homeric code of honour, loyalty and revenge'.

More accurately, these toffs really are first class prats.

The revenge of deadly Darius
by FIONA BARTON

Last updated at 21:55 18 August 2006

Smeared with blood and sweat, the two men grappled and thrashed around. The taller man groaned in pain from a fractured cheekbone and injuries to his ribs and nose as his attacker savagely kicked and punched him like someone possessed.

As the violence escalated, three young children watched and cheered their father from the windows of their home.

The son and three daughters of the other man could only look on in dumb horror as their father was battered into submission. It was an extraordinary and shocking scene. But all the more shocking given the identities of the combatants.

This bloody confrontation was between the brother of Princess Diana, Earl Spencer, and his best friend, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy. Guppy, who emerged the victor from the brawl, had deliberately lured his former friend, who had been his best man and provided £250,000 bail after his arrest, to his South African home for a showdown.

At stake was the honour of the wife Guppy adores and a bizarre accusation of treachery dating from more than a decade ago.

Spencer's 'crime' - an allegation vehemently denied by the Earl - was to have attempted to seduce Guppy's wife Patricia while his friend was languishing behind bars. It was a betrayal that Guppy, who has known Spencer since they were 13-year-old Eton schoolboys, insisted required extreme retribution.

Revenge has always been a dish relished by the disgraced Old Etonian. According to his old friend, Tory higher education spokesman Boris Johnson, he lives by the 'Homeric code of honour, loyalty and revenge'.

Indeed, as we shall see, it was his thirst for revenge that led to Guppy being jailed in 1993 for staging a faked jewel robbery and fraudulently claiming £1.8 million from insurers.

But it was thought that Guppy's wild days were over when he emerged from prison, having served half his five-year sentence. He declared himself keen to start a new life with his family away from the public gaze, first in Ireland and then in South Africa.

So how does Guppy live today? Where does he make his money?

Intriguingly, a Mail investigation has discovered that while he has an affluent lifestyle - including a mansion with swimming pool, international travel and shark-diving with friends - he has literally disappeared as far as officialdom is concerned.

He has no bank account in South Africa, no property or business under his name nor any registration with the tax authorities.

And he would have remained in the shadows but for the emergence last week of his act of vengeance when Guppy raised his patrician profile above the parapet to punish one of his closest and best-known friends.

But what was it that drove him to punish Charles Spencer?

Patricia Guppy, a pretty, delicate blonde from Sunderland, who once ran an escort agency, is understood to have kept the alleged incident that sparked Guppy's fury secret for more than a decade because she did not wish to upset her husband.

At the time, with her husband just starting his jail sentence, she was living on Spencer's Althorp estate in Northamptonshire.

Having turned down his sister Diana's request for permission to reside in the Garden House at Althorp, the Earl instead offered the house to Patricia and her toddler daughter, who was born shortly after Guppy's incarceration.
Friends of Guppy claim that while she was there - and later when she
for a face-to-face meeting came a month later when Spencer was due to visit Cape Town for his birthday on May 20. Guppy, who had returned from a European business trip specifically to confront his friend, called Spencer on his mobile phone and said he believed his story, but wanted to hear it from him in person.

A wary Spencer, who had married his second wife Caroline 'Pidge' Freud in 2001, agreed to meet Darius in a public place, but his friend convinced him it would be better to keep it private and assured him he would be safe at his house.

Patricia Guppy was away at a spa for the weekend when the Earl arrived at the house at lunchtime on May 21.

According to friends of Guppy, Darius asked his friend for an explanation and the Earl insisted he had never made advances on Patricia. Guppy accused him of lying and began punching and kicking him on the lawn in front of his children, who are said to have been 'cheering from the window'.

The attack left Spencer with cuts to his nose, a black eye, concussion and a fractured cheek bone.

It ended only when the new husband of Spencer's ex-wife Victoria - who also lives in the area - climbed over the gates to the Guppy house after hearing the fight.

Called Jonathan Aitken, though no relation of the disgraced former Tory MP, he was accompanied by Spencer's four children from his first marriage who were appalled at what they witnessed. Aitken pulled Guppy off and took a battered Spencer home.

Two days later Darius is understood to have written to Spencer accusing him again of sexually harassing his wife. To make sure he added insult to injury, 'friends' of Guppy let Earl Spencer's humiliation become public by briefing journalists and offering to show them Guppy's letter to Spencer.

The Earl has made no comment about the allegations or the attack. But the dramatic rupture of his friendship with Guppy has astonished those who know them.

The two were inseparable at Oxford during their wildest excesses, they were each other's best man and Spencer housed Guppy and his family when he was released from prison.

But Guppy's acts of retribution are legendary. At university, he famously engaged in a feud with a landlord during which he made a six-hour
abusive phone call and pushed fireworks through his target's letterboxes.
Then, in 1990, there was the tabloid journalist who Guppy wanted to have beaten up (with the reluctant assistance of the bumbling Boris
Johnson, who agreed to help discover the writer's address) for probing into his background.

But perhaps his most famous vendetta - until this week - was against Lloyd's of London. Guppy, who was named after the Persian king Darius by his Iranian folk-singer mother, risked his place in top-drawer society by faking a jewel robbery in a New York hotel.

He and fellow Oxford graduate Ben Marsh hired a stooge to tie them up and shoot a pillow so they could claim £1.8 million insurance to avenge Guppy's father, who had lost all his money as a Lloyd's name.

It was Charles Spencer who congratulated Guppy on his wedding day for fulfilling his prediction that he would be a millionaire or in Wormwood Scrubs by the age of 30.

And it was Charles Spencer who was rewarded with thanks for his 'steadfast loyalty' in Guppy's lurid autobiography, Roll The Dice. But the bond between the two men has been shattered irrevocably by the violent scenes in the quiet Cape Town enclave of Constantia. The confrontation has also raised fresh questions about the mercurial Darius Guppy.

Since his release from Ford Open Prison in February 1996, he has kept a low profile (apart from painting a Georgian mansion he bought in County Tipperary an interesting shade of lilac) and sought to escape his notoriety. It is perhaps inevitable that he ended up in South Africa, a popular refuge for a number of former villains over the years.

The fraudster, his wife - a former factory worker turned model - their daughter and sons are now firmly ensconced in their new home, bought under his wife's name for £433,000 in October 2004.

The sprawling bungalow sits at the top of a steep drive and is obscured from view by trees and bushes in the landscaped gardens.

Compared with the fake chateaux and huge Spanish-style villas that surround them, the house is modest, but it has all the accoutrements of a luxury expat life with its tennis courts and large swimming pool. Discretion is guaranteed in the oldest and most prestigious of Cape Town's southern suburbs. The place exudes the easy ambience of old money. Guppy's neighbours include diplomats, rich businessmen and Cape Town's settler aristocracy; families who have owned land in the area for generations.

Locals speak of him as a rather menacing, egotistical man with an interest in martial arts and extreme pastimes such as diving with sharks. But he remains something of an enigma to them. And Guppy, 42, would like to keep it that way.

He and Patricia prefer to socialise with a small and close circle of British expatriates including Charles Spencer's ex-wife, Victoria, a reformed drug addict, and her new husband Jonathan, a former Dior male model.Until recently, Earl Spencer, who spends part of the year in Cape Town, was part of their close-knit group.

The aristocrat has a grand mansion set in formal gardens with a stunning glass atrium just 200 yards from the Guppys and close to the impressive house sold by Mark Thatcher for £1.5 million last year after his conviction for attempting to help finance a coup in Equatorial Guinea.

The views from the Guppys' house, across the mature woodland and pastures of Bel Ombre Meadow on the other side of the road to the wooded slopes of Table Mountain beyond, are spectacular.

At weekends, the Meadow is thick with joggers - including Patricia - and locals walking their dogs.

It is Patricia, who celebrated her 40th birthday last week, in particular who appears to have settled best into Constantia life.

A model 'yummy mummy', she is a familiar figure at the village shopping centre, with its Cape Dutch-style limewash buildings packed with restaurants, designer boutiques and coffee shops.

She is a regular at the Carlton Skin Care Centre, where Constantia housewives go for their facials, and at the local Virgin Active gym and Constantia tennis club, where her sixyearold twin sons have lessons.

The children are privately educated at schools where fees are a fraction of their British equivalents.

Annual fees at the all-boys prep school attended by the Guppy boys are between £1,000 and £2,500 for day pupils, rising to just under £4,000 for boarders - a sixth of the £25,000 a year charged by Darius's alma mater, Eton College.

So life is good for the Guppys. But, one has to ask, how are they paying for all this?

Guppy left prison apparently penniless. He and his co-conspirator Ben Marsh were estimated to have made around £4 million from crime (there was a spot of gold smuggling as well as the insurance scam) and both were ordered to pay a £533,000 fine at the time of their conviction.

Marsh paid up the full amount, but Guppy claimed his share of the money had been spent or given to a mysterious businessman who had vanished. His fine was reduced to £227,000 on appeal and turned into a criminal compensation order payable to Lloyd's.

In 1994, he declared himself bankrupt in order to avoid paying the cash, but the judge, Mr Justice Holland, was unimpressed and ordered Guppy to stay in prison until he came up with the money.

Eventually, a deal was done and the fraudster paid £165,000 (borrowed from a benefactor) to get out of jail.

Guppy made an estimated £100,000 from the serialisation of his life story in a newspaper and set up a couple of import and export companies in Ireland, although neither seemed to do much business.

He also marketed himself on the after-dinner-speech circuit with Marsh offering, as his promotional literature says, 'incredible stories of a "James-Bond lifestyle including Uzi sub machineguns and crooks singing like canaries to the NYPD!"'

But, according to documents in his new country of residence, he is now a property investor.

It is true that he appears to have made a nice profit from his Irish house, which cost £250,000 and was sold five years later, after significant refurbishment, for £800,000. But no money from that project seems to have been invested in the Guppys' Constantia property.

It was bought from Jemplan Ltd, a company registered in the Isle of Man, with a mortgage for just under £500,000 - more than the total value of the house - from one of the largest banks in South Africa.

The house - and a blue Nissan Almera car - are registered in Patricia Guppy's name.

Her husband is not listed as a director of any company in South Africa, nor, despite his job title, does he own any property in the country, and is unknown to the main players in the property industry.

Guppy's 'business' certainly involves travel. 'He's never there,' says one neighbour. 'He's away two weeks in every month. It's always Patricia holding the fort.'

The tall, handsome Guppy is a familiar figure to regulars on the overnight flight from Johannesburg to Paris and has also been seen in London and Amsterdam.

His European sojourns mean that he pays no income tax in South Africa - residents who spend more than 183 days out of the country are exempt from tax on income earned abroad. But it means long absences from his family.

Patricia Guppy insists their marriage is as strong as ever - the couple recently celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary with a threeweek holiday in Istanbul. 'We're very happy,' she said last week at their home.

However, friends are concerned about the fallout of the confrontation with Earl Spencer. One said: 'Patricia is freaked out by exposure. Her big concern is the kids.'

She may be hoping that this is the last outing for Darius Guppy's violent alter ego.

Interestingly, he used a quotation from a famous Sir Francis Bacon essay to start his autobiography: 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to it, the more ought law to weed it out.'

The elusive Guppy appears to have learned nothing from his 17thcentury hero, who goes on to issue this dire warning: 'Nay rather, vindictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate.'

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