“He woke up in bed next to a dead hooker – you should have seen the look on his face! He was white as a sheet and shrieking with terror! I really thought he was going to crap himself!” chortles Old Etonian Dickie Throbbington-Heyes, as he recalls the 1990 Bullingdon Club jape which left future Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne convinced that he was a murderer. “Ozzie was convinced that he must have murdered her during a drunken sex game, then suffered an alcohol-induced blackout about it all! It was so bloody hilarious watching the oik getting so wound up, that we didn’t let on that she was already dead when we put her in his bed! He was too comatose on drink at the time to notice what we were doing!” The incident occurred following one of the exclusive Oxford University dining club’s notorious ‘dinners’, during which they had completely trashed a top restaurant in the city, two pubs and a strip joint – causing tens of thousands of pounds of damages – before retiring to a local hotel, where the future Tory cabinet minister found himself sharing his room with a cadaver. “He came rushing into my room in a blind panic, pleading with me to help him – I don’t know how I managed to keep a straight face,” guffaws Throbbington-Heyes. “Of course, I told him there was nothing I could do – even my father’s money couldn’t buy off a murder investigation!”
Osborne was apparently now in such a panic over the possibility of being arrested for murder, he immediately attempted to dispose of the body. “He was convinced that he was going get banged up in Pentonville and spend the next twenty years taking it up the chutney from some Rastafarian,” says Throbbington-Heyes, wheezing with laughter as he recounts the details of the event. “He tried to get ‘Spazza’ Hendricks to go down to the hotel dining room and filch a carving knife, so as to cut up the body and flush the bits down the toilet!” Osborne was finally convinced that some of the hotel staff could be paid off to get rid of the dead prostitute, but that he’d have to lie low for a while. “Basil Cockland managed to persuade him that we’d have to smuggle him out of the hotel in disguise as part of the cover-up, and got him to black up with boot polish,” the forty-two year old heir to the Throbbington Industries fortune gasps, virtually helpless with laughter. “Honestly, the sight of him pretending to be a darkie was so bloody hilarious – ‘Spazza’ laughed so hard he went into one of his epilectic fits, thrashing around on the floor, foaming at the mouth and wetting himself! That’s why we called him ‘Spazza’, you know. Because of the seizures.”
Wearing blackface, a frizzy afro wig borrowed from a hotel maid, platform shoes and wide lapels, Osborne was persuaded by his fellow Bullingdon Club members to take refuge in a local brothel. “Well, he looked like a pimp, so it only seemed logical for him to hide out in a knocking shop,” sniggers multi-millionaire Throbbington-Heyes. “Of course, we’d paid the girls there to play along – they told George it wasn’t just the rozzers looking for him, but the dead prostitute’s pimp as well! He was petrified!” For three days Osborne was forced to stay in the brothel, posing as the girls’ pimp and reluctantly participating in sex parties. “We were having so much fun watching him pretend to be a bad ass black guy. The best bit was when he pretended to snort a couple of lines of coke – it was actually icing sugar – he was coughing and sneezing for hours,” his former friend says. “But all good things must come to an end, and we finally put him out of his misery – he didn’t know whether to be grateful or furious! He never attended another Bullingdon dinner, though!”
Incredibly, Throbbington-Heyes – who admits that he only obtained his first class degree because his father’s butler sat his finals for him, after his social activities had left him no time for study – claims that he is only now revealing this sordid episode in order to protect the Chancellor, rather than embarrass him. “It seems some photos of him in the blackface and snorting that ‘cocaine; with the prostitutes were surreptitiously taken by some of the chaps – Cockland, most probably – and found their way to the press,” he explains. “There have been a lot of rumours doing the rounds that these tabloid chappies might have been using them to blackmail George – why else would he have recommended that Coulsen fellow to Cameron? Anyway, I thought that by revealing the truth behind them, it would effectively neutralise any threat they posed!” A spokesperson for George Osborne has denied both the existence of the photographs and that the dead hooker incident ever took place.
The question still remains as to who actually did kill the hooker Osborne found in his bed? Throbbington-Heyes claims to have no idea. “’Spazza’ always reckoned that he found her in the back alley behind the hotel,” he alleges. “Apparently she was already cold when he found her behind some bins. She probably died of some hideous disease, or choked to death on some punter’s penis – which, ironically, is how old ‘Spazza’ eventually went, when he had one of his fits during a Rugby Club bash. Anyway, he told me that he put her back where he found her after we’d gotten Ozzie out of the hotel.” However, others believe that the corpse’s origins were far more sinister. “There have long been rumours of prostitutes and tramps being murdered during these wild toff parties,” opines investigative journalist Gerry Rumbler, who has spent years trying to uncover the Bullingdon Club’s darkest secrets. “After all, the whole point of the Bullingdon Club is to demonstrate to the lower classes that wealth allows you to do anything, regardless of the taboos and laws being broken. But what’s the greatest thrill that even money can’t usually buy? Murder, of course! It’s the ultimate statement of their superiority – to take a human life without suffering any consequences!”
According to Rumbler, the Bullingdon Club would regularly hire prostitutes to attend their dinners, or lure in down and outs on the promise of free alcohol, before killing them. “They’d keep them in cages during the dinner, then let them out and chase them around the restaurant, before beating them to death with cricket bats,” he says. “Everyone had to strike at least one blow, so they were all implicated! It was whilst they were in this murderous frenzy that they’d smash the whole place up as well!” As well as paying for the damage to the restaurant, the club members would also pay for the disposal of the body and a complete cover-up of the murder, Rumble believes. “They’d buy off the staff, police, the whole bloody lot – don’t forget, these are the offspring of this country’s wealthiest bastards,” he says. “They obviously decided to have more ‘fun’ with the unfortunate hooker in the hotel room incident, even after she was dead, planting her in Osborne’s bed before disposing of her.” Throbbington-Heyes has dismissed such allegations, claiming that the Bullingdon Club’s activities are nothing more than a harmless letting off of steam. “It’s no different than when you working class chaps go out and beat each other up after a football match,” he says. “The only difference is that they get five years if they’re caught, whilst we just get a caution if we’re really unlucky.”
