Frankie isn’t going to Hollywood as model trashes Trump’s US
HER American grandmother, Jeanie, one of Queen Elizabeth II’S closest friends, never lost the accent of her native Wyoming, even after marrying into the British aristocracy, perhaps because she holidayed each summer in Sheridan county, close to her birthplace, Big Horn.
But such familial ties evidently count for nothing as far as model Frankie Herbert is concerned.
The Earl of Carnarvon’s 28-year-old niece has just subjected the US to a damning tirade – provoked by what she calls its ‘racist, sexist, bigoted’ administration ‘run by a convicted felon’.
Explains Frankie, whose family seat, Highclere Castle, achieved global renown as Downton Abbey: ‘My trans friends, immigrant friends, like, are not safe...there’s children being held in detention centres’. Turning her attention to US foreign policy, Frankie, whose stepfather is the Duke of Norfolk, says ‘girls’ schools, children’s schools in Iran [are] being bombed, genocide being funded’.
The timing of Frankie’s denunciation is remarkable. ‘I finally got the working visa, my O-1,’ she concedes on social media, explaining she’d been ‘signed by an incredible agency in LA’.
But she’s decided she ‘simply cannot in good conscience go and work in the US’ – where her great-uncle, Jeanie’s brother Malcolm, was a Republican senator admired for a ‘willingness to be stupendously politically incorrect’.
When Jeanie’s husband, the 7th Earl, died of a heart attack watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre on television, the Queen and Philip flew from Balmoral to attend his funeral.
What Jeanie would have made of Frankie’s diatribe is a matter for conjecture. In widowhood, she remained close to the Queen, who visited her a week before she died, aged 83, in 2019.