life with his own set of rules ....

OBITUARY

William Sinclair Obituary

Old Etonian hedonist and friend of George Osborne, who exuded star quality and went through life with his own set of rules

The thrilling thing about William Sinclair and the quality that made life so hard for him as he got older was that he would not hesitate to do what others would never dare. Whether it was standing on a table in a restaurant to declaim Shakespeare, defacing library books, or taking a waitress’s hand as he left a café and persuading her to walk with him for the pleasure of it up a street in Rome, he was always life-enhancing if unpredictable company. He acknowledged no limits and did not abide by the usual rules.

In another age he might have been a buccaneer. Tall, tough and strong, in looks, he reminded some of Errol Flynn. Had he possessed more of a literary gift for telling stories to go with that he could have been another Patrick Leigh Fermor. For he had the charm, intelligence and ability to pass between different cultures and strata of society.

As it was, his life came at times to resemble that chronicled by another Old Etonian, George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London. Although he had none of Orwell’s dourness, drugs and alcohol made him an increasingly unreliable friend, and a less than dependable employee in an impressively wide assortment of jobs. These ranged from managing a boutique hotel in Chelsea to reading the local news on Italian television. His workplace odyssey culminated in his joining the Royal Navy in his late thirties, as a rating.

Yet, for all the harm he did himself and the damage it wrought to relationships with those closest to him, Sinclair never brought his troubles into his friends’ lives. Indeed, if it was in his power, he would be the one coming to their aid. When, after too good a night in Oxford, one of his friends was being arrested, Sinclair insisted on being taken into custody as well so as not to leave his companion to face the law on his own. Told that there were no grounds for arrest, he inquired what would be, and proceeded to swear at the arresting officer until added to the bag.

An only child, Isaiah William Columba Stroma Sinclair was born in 1971 to Judith and Angus, who worked for the Central Office of Information and was a son of Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Party in the 1930s. After a childhood in Norfolk, William went to Eton where he channelled his wild vitality into rowing and the wall game. He discovered a talent for debate, as well as for getting others to do things for him.

Part of his gap year was spent riding across Rajasthan on an Enfield motorcycle, rather less reading the only book he had brought out to India, Bertrand Russell’sA History of Western Philosophy. He then dropped out of a theology degree at Bristol University to do a cookery course. In the early 1990s when he moved to London and worked as an estate agent, his recreational drug use began to intensify.

In 1992 he met Natalie Rowe. Their worlds had been rather different. She had been born to Afro-Caribbean parents in Bradford and had become a prostitute, then a madam and dominatrix. Nevertheless, the attraction between them was strong and sincere, and two years later they had a son together: Nicholas is now a fashion model and the father of a son, Justice. Sinclair had, however, started to smoke crack and Rowe decided she could not live with him.

A decade later a photograph of her taken in 1994 with her arm around George Osborne, who had been friends with Sinclair, surfaced in the press as it purported to show cocaine on the table in front of her. Osborne, by then shadow chancellor, denied ever having taken the drug. Sinclair was referred to anonymously in his statement as a warning of its dangers — a friend who had lost his way, but had recovered his sobriety. It would be nearer the mark, however, to say that while Sinclair was sober for long periods, there were also lapses. He later found a measure of peace in the company of a Sister Nazarena and her fellow Trappist nuns. By then he had settled in Italy.

In Rome, he met a lawyer, Raffaella Betti Berutto. They had a daughter, Giulia, who is at school, but Sinclair’s behaviour again became too volatile for them to marry. (He was married briefly, in 1994, when he agreed to wed a Serb living in London, Stasha, supposedly as a favour to a friend.) Since 2005, he had just about made ends meet with jobs teaching English, including for a year in Cologne, as a salesman for a tarmac company and by translating films.

He lost his life after an evening’s drinking in Budapest, when an act of characteristically reckless bravado led to his falling into the waters of the Danube from the city’s Chain Bridge.

William Sinclair, free spirit, was born on June 10, 1971. He died on September 5, 2018, aged 47