Meet The Ladies Of London, Itvbe'S Latest Reality Show Meet The Ladies Of London, Itvbe'S Latest Reality Show Meet The Ladies Of London, Itvbe'S Latest Reality Show The lady you'll love to hate: An heiress worth £20m, she has manicures during business meetings and her minions say she's the boss from hell. Now Caroline is Queen Bee on TV's poshest reality show Caroline Stanbury is having one of those days. Neither the nanny nor the cleaner nor the housekeeper turned up when they should have this morning, so she had to get her kids up and breakfasted and out to school — all three of them, all by herself! By the time she arrives at her company’s office to meet me, clutching a latte and ordering an underling to pick up her leather jacket from where she dropped it, she says she feels like she’s already done a full day’s work. Poor lamb. Such was the morning melee, the 38-year-old even seems to have forgotten half her clothes — her skirt is so short it’s barely visible, and there was apparently no time for tights. It’s a striking look: startlingly slender, bare legs disappearing into huge hulking biker boots, with studs — but is it October office wear? Yes, if you are Caroline Stanbury, millionaire, socialite and now — she hopes — our latest reality TV star. For Caroline is one of the well-heeled, in all senses, women on a new show called Ladies Of London, an ITV series seeking to inject some class into the reality TV phenomenon. It follows seven very well-to-do, very wealthy (Caroline is worth £20 million) women-about-town (the town being London), all pitched together in the hope of engineering a pedigree catfight. Caroline is the poshest totty and has been dubbed Queen Bee due to her cut-glass accent and high-handed ways. The other women joke of being her minions, which is saying something — the line-up includes a real-life viscountess and the model Caprice. She admits reality TV is an odd direction for someone like her. ‘My mother was a bit horrified at first,’ she nods. ‘People from my background just don’t tend to do this, do they?’ No, they do not. Though Caroline, a member of the Vestey food producers dynasty, first raised eyebrows when she was romantically linked to Prince Andrew (‘quite mortifying because he was just a friend,’ she insists) and photographed with Hugh Grant at a party, which led to more (erroneous, it seems) tittle-tattle. Still, it’s a leap from the gossip pages to the bling-bling, in-your-face populist circus that is the world of reality TV. Suggest there’s something a bit, erm, cheap about this career swerve, however, and she takes your head off. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t a cheap series to make,’ she shoots back. ‘It was actually the most expensive programme the channel [Bravo, who originally produced it] have made. What they spent on flying people around wa

• published: 18 Oct 2014
• views: 21