Revealed: Why Meghan Markle took two nervous steps back after seeing Kate for the first time since she gave the Oprah interview
Prince Harry and Prince William had not been seen together since the during which they sat at opposite sides of the cathedral.
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Daily Mail
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
REVEALED: Why daughter of privilege had FOUR children taken into custody amid fears for their lives - years before she killed her fifth baby
Runaway aristocrat Constance Marten 's first four children were taken into care amid fears for their lives – years before she killed her fifth baby, the Mail can reveal today. Marten was yesterday convicted alongside her violent lover Mark Gordon of causing their newborn Victoria's death after going on the run to prevent authorities removing her. In bombshell testimony made public today after a legal challenge by the Mail, Marten, 38, and her partner Gordon, 51, were deemed too violent to be parents. A family court judge had warned two years before the national manhunt to save Victoria: 'It is much more likely than not that in the foreseeable future the children will be exposed to serious physical violence between their parents. It is quite possible that they will be injured themselves.' Victoria's decomposed body was found in a shopping bag in Brighton on March 1 after the pair had gone on the run and slept in a freezing tent in wintry conditions. It is thought the child – said to have been 16 days old when she died – may have developed hypothermia or been smothered, but no cause of death has ever been determined. But yesterday, as the callous couple were convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence at the end of a two-year prosecution, they refused to accept their culpability. After the verdict was read out, Gordon angrily shouted from the dock of the Old Bailey: 'I'm not surprised by the verdict. It was faulty, it was unlawful. This is not over, it has just begun.' Marten yelled: 'It's a scam', before walking out of the court in fury. The pair had already been convicted at an earlier trial of child cruelty, concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice. For a special episode of the Mail's award-winning The Trial podcast breaking down the Constance Marten verdict, click here Following two trials, costing taxpayers an estimated £1.6million, it can now be revealed that: ■ Gordon is a 'sociopathic' rapist whose sadistic crimes were compared to US serial killer Ted Bundy. ■ A national safeguarding panel is now looking at the landmark case as police have called for new laws to protect unborn children. ■ The couple were granted legal aid for their defence, hiring 19 lawyers at an estimated cost of £600,000 – yet Marten is a trust fund heiress worth £2.4million. ■ Gordon attempted to avoid trial, claiming he was more notorious than Wayne Couzens, the Scotland Yard police firearms officer who murdered Sarah Everard. ■ Marten's father was a page to the late Queen Elizabeth II – and her grandmother was a playmate of Princess Margaret. In an extraordinary case which gripped the country, the couple went on the run with their baby in a 'desperately selfish' bid to prevent her being taken into care after their four previous children were removed by social workers, who feared they would come to harm. Scotland Yard launched a nationwide manhunt, spending more than £1.2million chasing them around the country for 53 days after discovering a placenta in their car when the vehicle was ablaze on a motorway in Greater Manchester on January 5, 2023. More than 100 officers pursued the couple as they fled in taxis, travelling hundreds of miles across the country from Bolton to Liverpool, then to Harwich in Essex, and on to east London before finally resorting to camping on the South Downs in the freezing cold. Five police forces joined the hunt, devoting 1,000 officer hours at a cost of £500,000 to find the child's body after the pair refused to co-operate when they were arrested near Brighton after nearly two months on the run. Police were shocked to discover the millionaire aristocrat had hidden her child's body in a soiled nappy inside a Lidl bag-for-life. It was found beneath an empty beer can and discarded sandwich packaging in a disused shed. Experts have described Gordon, 51, as a sociopathic sex offender considered so dangerous that experts compared his sadistic crimes to those of Ted Bundy or Australian-American serial killer Christopher Wilder. Hooked on violent pornography, Gordon was just 14 when he raped a woman at knifepoint in 1989 after breaking into her home armed with knives and hedge clippers, telling her: 'Don't scream or I'll kill your children.' Over the next four and a half hours, the teenage rapist tormented his victim, telling her she was going to die as he ran the blade down her body. The mother recalled: 'I had no hope. I was told to say goodbye to my children because this was the day I was going to die.' Franklin Nooe, treatment director of a sex assault clinic who counselled Gordon's first victim, described him as a sociopath in the same category as Bundy: 'That's the 5 per cent of the rapists, that's your Ted Bundys … that obviously enjoy it. They are a progressive kind of rapist that would … go from just raping, to raping and murdering'. Within three weeks of carrying out the attack, Gordon broke into the home of a second woman armed with a set of knives. But as he crept into her bedroom Gordon was startled to find her husband home. Gordon battered him around the head with a shovel before fleeing. He was jailed for 40 years, serving half of that in the US before being deported back to the UK. He hid his appalling criminal history from Marten when they met in 2016. It wasn't until he assaulted two police officers in hospital after Marten gave birth under a false name that she learnt he was a violent rapist considered at 'high risk' of reoffending. Gordon attacked Marten when she was pregnant with their third child, throwing her out of their flat window. She fell 18ft, hitting a car on the way. As she lay screaming in agony with a shattered spleen and internal bleeding, Gordon tried to delay paramedics alerted by concerned neighbours. Marten would spend the next eight days in hospital recovering from surgery, but Gordon demanded she be discharged, despite doctors warning this would put her life at risk. The domestic abuse was the catalyst for a family court judge to rule their four older children should be taken into care . It was then that District Judge Madeleine Reardon warned the children were likely to be 'exposed to serious physical violence' adding: 'It is quite possible that they will be injured themselves.' During their prosecution, the couple conspired to delay, lie and obfuscate repeatedly in a bid to sabotage the case. Marten and Gordon will be sentenced on September 15.
Daily Mail
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Police officer, 32, is charged after unmarked cop car crashed into teenage pedestrian
A serving police officer has been charged with dangerous driving after his unmarked car ploughed into a teenage pedestrian. PC Dan Parsons, 32, based in South Gloucestershire, was driving the vehicle in Bristol as he responded to an emergency on Sunday, November 24. The unmarked police car collided with a 19-year-old woman at a roundabout, where the A4174 joins Badminton Road in Emersons Green. Following the crash, the teenager was taken to hospital with injuries and has since been discharged. Avon and Somerset Police have referred the collision to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which deemed it suitable for a local investigation by the Professional Standards Department. An investigation was also carried out by the police's Serious Collision Investigations Team and the case was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, resulting in the officer being charged. PC Parsons will appear at Bristol Magistrates' Court later today.
Sky News
44 minutes ago
- Sky News
How Nigel Farage and Reform UK are winning over women
Reform UK is on the march. Following a barnstorming performance in this year's local elections, they are now the most successful political party on TikTok, engaging younger audiences. But most of their 400,000 followers are men. I was at the local elections launch for Reform in March, looking around for any young women to interview who had come to support the party at its most ambitious rally yet, and I was struggling. A woman wearing a "let's save Britain" hat walked by, and I asked her to help me. "Now you say it, there are more men here," she said. But she wasn't worried, adding: "We'll get the women in." And that probably best sums up Reform's strategy. When Nigel Farage threw his hat into the ring to become an MP for Reform, midway through the general election campaign, they weren't really thinking about the diversity of their base. As a result, they attracted a very specific politician. Fewer than 20% of general election candidates for Reform were women, and the five men elected were all white with a median age of 60. Polling shows that best, too. According to YouGov's survey from June 2025, a year on from the election, young women are one of Reform UK's weakest groups, with just 7% supporting Farage's party - half the rate of men in the same age group. The highest support comes from older men, with a considerable amount of over-65s backing Reform - almost 40%. But the party hoped to change all that at the local elections. Time to go pro It was the closing act of Reform's September conference and Farage had his most serious rallying cry: it was time for the party to "professionalise". In an interview with me last year, Farage admitted "no vetting" had occurred for one of his new MPs, James McMurdock. Only a couple of months after he arrived in parliament, it was revealed he had been jailed after being convicted of assaulting his then girlfriend in 2006 while drunk outside a nightclub. McMurdock told me earlier this year: "I would like to do my best to do as little harm to everyone else and at the same time accept that I was a bad person for a moment back then. I'm doing my best to manage the fact that something really regrettable did happen." He has since suspended himself from the party over allegations about his business affairs. He has denied any wrongdoing. 0:40 Later, two women who worked for another of Reform's original MPs, Rupert Lowe, gave "credible" evidence of bullying or harassment by him and his team, according to a report from a KC hired by the party. Lowe denies all wrongdoing and says the claims were retaliation after he criticised Farage in an interview with the Daily Mail, describing his then leader's style as "messianic". The Crown Prosecution Service later said it would not charge Lowe after an investigation. He now sits as an independent MP. 1:04 A breakthrough night But these issues created an image problem and scuppered plans for getting women to join the party. So, in the run-up to the local elections, big changes were made. The first big opportunity presented itself when a by-election was called in Runcorn and Helsby. The party put up Sarah Pochin as a candidate, and she won a nail-biting race by just six votes. Reform effectively doubled their vote share there compared to the general election - jumping to 38% - and brought its first female MP into parliament. And in the Lincolnshire mayoral race - where Andrea Jenkyns was up for the role - they won with 42% of the vote. The council results that night were positive, too, with Reform taking control of 10 local authorities. They brought new recruits into the party - some of whom had never been involved in active politics. 6:11 'The same vibes as Trump' Catherine Becker is one of them and says motherhood, family, and community is at the heart of Reform's offering. It's attracted her to what she calls Reform's "common sense" policies. As Reform's parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Highgate in last year's general election, and now a councillor, she also taps into Reform's strategy of hyper-localism - trying to get candidates to talk about local issues of crime, family, and law and order in the community above everything else. Jess Gill was your quintessential Labour voter: "I'm northern, I'm working class, I'm a woman, based on the current stereotype that would have been the party for me." But when Sir Keir Starmer knelt for Black Lives Matter, she said that was the end of her love affair with the party, and she switched. "Women are fed up of men not being real men," she says. "Starmer is a bit of a wimp, where Nigel Farage is a funny guy - he gives the same vibes as Trump in a way." 'Shy Reformers' But most of Reform's recruits seem to have defected from the Conservative Party, according to the data, and this is where the party sees real opportunity. Anna McGovern was one of those defectors after the astonishing defeat of the Tories in the general election. She thinks there may be "shy Reformers" - women who support the party but are unwilling to speak about it publicly. "You don't see many young women like myself who are publicly saying they support Reform," she says. "I think many people fear that if they publicly say they support Reform, what their friends might think about them. I've faced that before, where people have made assumptions of my beliefs because I've said I support Reform or more right-wing policies." But representation isn't their entire strategy. Reform have pivoted to speaking about controversial topics - the sort they think the female voters they're keen to attract may be particularly attuned to. "Reform are speaking up for women on issues such as transgenderism, defining what a woman is," McGovern says. And since Reform's original five MPs joined parliament, grooming gangs have been mentioned 159 times in the Commons - compared to the previous 13 years when it was mentioned 88 times, despite the scandal first coming to prominence back in 2011. But the pitfall of that strategy is where it could risk alienating other communities. Pochin, Reform's first and only female MP, used her first question in parliament to the prime minister to ask if he would ban the burka - something that isn't Reform policy, but which she says was "punchy" to "get the attention to start the debate". 0:31 'What politics is all about' Alex Philips was the right-hand woman to Farage during the Brexit years. She's still very close to senior officials in Reform and a party member, and tells me these issues present an opportunity. "An issue in politics is a political opportunity and what democracy is for is actually putting a voice to a representation, to concerns of the public. That's what politics is all about." Luke Tryl is the executive director of the More In Common public opinion and polling firm, and says the shift since the local elections is targeted and effective. Reform's newer converts are much more likely to be female, as the party started to realise you can't win a general election without getting the support of effectively half the electorate. "When we speak to women, particularly older women in focus groups, there is a sense that women's issues have been neglected by the traditional mainstream parties," he says. "Particularly issues around women's safety, and women's concerns aren't taken as seriously as they should be. "If Reform could show it takes their concerns seriously, they may well consolidate their support." According to his focus groups, the party's vote share among women aged 18 to 26 shot up in May - jumping from 12% to 21% after the local elections. But the gender divide in right-wing parties is still stark, Tryl says, and representation will remain an uphill battle for a party historically dogged by controversy and clashes. A Reform UK spokesman told Sky News: "Reform is attracting support across all demographics. "Our support with women has surged since the general election a year ago, in that time we have seen Sarah Pochin and Andrea Jenkyns elected in senior roles for the party."
