Carole Cadwalladr is currently cranking up her usual output of eye-swiveling conspiracy theories to the maximum. In quarantine Guido has had the time to find the first recorded case of one of Carole’s tall tales getting published…

According to a 30 year old Cherwell report, Carole – then a student at Hertford College – had gatecrashed a party for “the one hundred richest and most beautiful in Oxford”. Carole and her friend, according to the report in Cherwell, subsequently concocted a story and sold it to the Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster column. It involved the nuptial union of Viscount Weymouth’s daughter and Count Lupas von Maltzahn. £200 for the two girls, no questions asked…

Carole’s clearly changed, however, as she soon reportedly became “wracked with remorse” for the tale, and ended up giving the cash back to the journalist (supposedly in the form of £200-worth of Uncle Ben’s Cookies). Carole would double-down these days…

Read the Cherwell article in full below