EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Brother of Diana's 'love triangle rival' dies after a lifetime of drug-riddled tragedy before he was redeemed by marriage

On the face of it, he might have seemed to have it all, being the heir to an earldom and the best part of 20,000 Yorkshire acres, not to mention being sent to school at £46,740-a-year Ampleforth where Rupert Everett was among his contemporaries.

But the life of Viscount Pollington, who has died aged 64, offers a stark reminder that there is so much that matters more than inherited status and riches. 

Indeed, until a redemptive marriage at the age of 58, Johnny Pollington, elder son of the 8th Earl of Mexborough, seemed to be defined by a succession of tragedies.

These began when his mother Elizabeth, daughter of the 6th Earl of Verulum, ended her marriage and took Johnny and his younger sister, Alethea, from Arden Hall, the family seat in Yorkshire, to live in London, where she succumbed to alcoholism and depression, sometimes requiring breakfast to be brought to her in bed at 4am. 

In the words of one aristocratic friend, it was 'a tricky childhood. Johnny had a permanent cold, was always snivelling.'

In adulthood both Johnny and Alethea experimented with narcotics. 

These seemingly intensified Alethea's belief that she was trapped in a love-triangle involving her one-time fiancé, James Gilbey, and Gilbey's closest female friend, Diana, Princess of Wales, whom Gilbey playfully nicknamed 'Squidgy'.

Alethea's dependency on drugs led her father to cut off her allowance. It also persuaded Gilbey to end their relationship. 

Alethea later said that she'd been shattered by the emergence of the so-called 'Squidgy Tapes' – recordings of intimate conversations between Gilbey and the Princess of Wales, in which Gilbey said to Diana: 'Oh Squidgy, I love you.'

In September 1994, Johnny Pollington found his sister dead in her Chelsea flat, victim of a cocktail of heroin, cocaine and anti-depressants. 

But, instead of reporting her death, he embarked on a one-man mission to hunt down those who'd sold her the drugs. 

It ended in 'a scuffle' in a house in Barnes, south-west London, after which he went to a pub and downed 'three or four doubles'.

Alcohol failed to give him peace of mind. The following year, he was arrested after threatening to kill customers at the Grove Tavern, in London's Knightsbridge. 

He was ordered to do 100 hours community service and put on probation for two years.

In the late 1990s, he retreated to a basement flat on the border of Chelsea and Knightsbridge where he and two others spent their days smoking crack cocaine, sending the butler out to 'score' the drug for them.

Friends feared that that might be how his life would end. But, despite consorting with an old school friend, Dominic French, who was regularly in and out of prison, Pollington avoided the same fate.

Then, in 2017, he fell in love with divorcee Norma Phoenix, an exceptionally talented photographer who had also worked as a counsellor.

They married the following year. 'She was devoted to him,' a female friend tells me, explaining that Norma – 'a very, very good person' – went 'through hell and high water' for her husband.

Norma described it as 'a hell of a rollercoaster but one I'll never forget' when, at the beginning of this year, she announced that Johnny had cancer. 

'His physical pain is off the scale and my emotional pain is off the scale,' she alerted friends. 'The two of us are a right pair but we are treasuring every last month and minute together.'

'She was always with him, at Trinity Hospice,' reflects one of those friends. 'Her faith is unshakeable.'

As well as Norma, he is survived by his father, 93, and by a half-brother and half-sister from his father's second marriage.