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Newspaper article
Smeared with blood and sweat, the two men grappled and thrashed around. The taller man groaned in pain from a fractured cheekbone and injuries to his ribs and nose as his attacker savagely kicked and punched him like someone possessed.
As the violence escalated, three young children watched and cheered their father from the windows of their home.
The son and three daughters of the other man could only look on in dumb horror as their father was battered into submission. It was an extraordinary and shocking scene. But all the more shocking given the identities of the combatants.
This bloody confrontation was between the brother of Princess Diana, Earl Spencer, and his best friend, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy. Guppy, who emerged the victor from the brawl, had deliberately lured his former friend, who had been his best man and provided £250,000 bail after his arrest, to his South African home for a showdown.
At stake was the honour of the wife Guppy adores and a bizarre accusation of treachery
dating from more than a decade ago.
Spencer's 'crime' - an allegation vehemently denied by the Earl - was to have attempted to seduce Guppy's wife Patricia while his friend was languishing behind bars. It was a betrayal that Guppy, who has known Spencer since they were 13-year-old Eton schoolboys, insisted required extreme retribution.
Revenge has always been a dish relished by the disgraced Old Etonian. According to his old friend, Tory higher education spokesman Boris Johnson, he lives by the 'Homeric code of honour, loyalty and revenge'.
Indeed, as we shall see, it was his thirst for revenge that led to Guppy being jailed in 1993 for staging a faked jewel robbery and fraudulently claiming £1.8 million from insurers.
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A wary Spencer, who had married his second wife Caroline 'Pidge' Freud in 2001, agreed to meet Darius in a public place, but his friend convinced him it would be better to keep it private and assured him he would be safe at his house.
Patricia Guppy was away at a spa for the weekend when the Earl arrived at the house at lunchtime on May 21.
According to friends of Guppy, Darius asked his friend for an explanation and the Earl insisted he had never made advances on Patricia. Guppy accused him of lying and began punching and kicking him on the lawn in front of his children, who are said to have been 'cheering from the window'.
The attack left Spencer with cuts to his nose, a black eye, concussion and a fractured cheek bone.
It ended only when the new husband of Spencer's ex-wife Victoria - who also lives in the area - climbed over the gates to the Guppy house after hearing the fight.
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Two days later Darius is understood to have written to Spencer accusing him again of sexually harassing his wife. To make sure he added insult to injury, 'friends' of Guppy let Earl Spencer's humiliation become public by briefing journalists and offering to show them Guppy's letter to Spencer.
The Earl has made no comment about the allegations or the attack. But the dramatic rupture of his friendship with Guppy has astonished those who know them.
The two were inseparable at Oxford during their wildest excesses, they were each other's best man and Spencer housed Guppy and his family when he was released from prison.
But Guppy's acts of retribution are legendary. At university, he famously engaged in a feud with a landlord during which he made a six-hour abusive phone call and pushed fireworks through his target's letterboxes.
Then, in 1990, there was the tabloid journalist who Guppy wanted to have beaten up (with the reluctant assistance of the bumbling Boris Johnson, who agreed to help discover the writer's address) for probing into his background.
But perhaps his most famous vendetta - until this week - was against Lloyd's of London. Guppy, who was named after the Persian king Darius by his Iranian folk-singer mother, risked his place in top-drawer society by faking a jewel robbery in a New York hotel.
He and fellow Oxford graduate Ben Marsh hired a stooge to tie them up and shoot a pillow so they could claim £1.8 million insurance to avenge Guppy's father, who had lost all his money as a Lloyd's name.
It was Charles Spencer who congratulated Guppy on his wedding day for fulfilling his prediction that he would be a millionaire or in Wormwood Scrubs by the age of 30.
And it was Charles Spencer who was rewarded with thanks for his 'steadfast loyalty' in Guppy's lurid autobiography, Roll The Dice. But the bond between the two men has been shattered irrevocably by the violent scenes in the quiet Cape Town enclave of Constantia. The confrontation has also raised fresh questions about the mercurial Darius Guppy.
Since his release from Ford Open Prison in February 1996, he has kept a low profile (apart from painting a Georgian mansion he bought in County Tipperary an interesting shade of lilac) and sought to escape his notoriety. It is perhaps inevitable that he ended up in South Africa, a popular refuge for a number of former villains over the years.
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However, friends are concerned about the fallout of the confrontation with Earl Spencer. One said: 'Patricia is freaked out by exposure. Her big concern is the kids.'
She may be hoping that this is the last outing for Darius Guppy's violent alter ego.
Interestingly, he used a quotation from a famous Sir Francis Bacon essay to start his autobiography: 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to it, the more ought law to weed it out.'
The elusive Guppy appears to have learned nothing from his 17thcentury hero, who goes on to issue this dire warning: 'Nay rather, vindictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate.'