They Don’t Make ’em Like Fleur Anymore
Fleur de Villiers
by Boris Starling
March 2023
On International Women’s Day, Boris Starling pays tribute to a remarkable family friend.
Fleur de Villiers was a remarkable woman: equal parts stellar intellect, titanium moral fibre and profound humanity.
As a journalist in her native South Africa she spent 25 years writing about the iniquities of apartheid, at a time when such persistent and relentless criticism invited the attention not just of political opponents but of the security forces too. Behind the public words were private actions of even greater import, for Fleur was one of those who toiled in the shadows to bring together Afrikaner ministers, powerful businessmen and ANC leaders, and thereby lay the foundations of the end to that hateful system.
It was painstaking and often frustrating work, weaning ancestral enemies away from the inertia of their mutual loathing, and progress was neither quick nor easy. Sometimes she needed the patience of Job, other times the wisdom of Solomon: but that the change happened without civil war is at least partly due to her and her colleagues who laboured so long without recognition or reward, save for the priceless knowledge that they were doing not just the right thing but the only possible thing for the future of their beloved and beautiful country.
In the mid-80s she came to England on a sabbatical, and loved it so much that she decided to make her home here. The second half of her career saw her expand from journalism—she still wrote leaders for The Times—to high-level corporate PR, where she was pushing the need for ESG almost before it had even been identified as such, and to the chair of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
But she was equally at home far from the boardrooms and corridors of power, and became an integral part of every community in which she involved herself: the Chelsea Society, the Royal Hospital, any number of local charities, and of course Christ Church, to where a dozen or more streams of her life came today to form a temporary ecclesiastical delta a stone’s throw from the Thames.
My own family’s friendship with her went back almost 40 years, not long after she’d arrived in England. Fleur it was who gave the speech at my sister Bee’s wedding: a wonderful speech, of course, not just because she was a wordsmith of great craft but because what she said was warm, funny, perceptive, affectionate and loving. For me she was a regular and excellent companion at Twickenham: any call from her on a Thursday or Friday in November, February or March almost invariably began with the words ‘I’ve rustled up a couple of tickets.’
One of the few times I saw her speechless was in the autumn of 2002, when England stuck 50 points on a Springbok team who played most of the match with 14 men following an early red card. It wasn’t the defeat which bothered Fleur, or even the margin of it: it was that the Bokke had come with nothing but cheap shots and an intent to maim rather than play. From the moment the full-time whistle went we had a tacit agreement Never To Speak Of This Again.
The church was packed today, of course, for she was much admired, much respected and much loved. She would debate anything and everything with you, almost always without rancour and with the twin elixirs of whisky and laughter. And though she would have hated me using this cliché, it is nonetheless entirely apposite: they don’t make ’em like her any more.
