21 years after snub by neighbour the Queen, billionaire John Kluge dies

JOHN Kluge, the American billionaire who was famously snubbed by the Queen when he became the Royal Family's near neighbour on Royal Deeside, has died at the age of 95.

Kluge, once listed as the wealthiest man in America, was the controversial owner of the Mar Lodge estate on Royal Deeside, close to the Queen's Balmoral estate, from 1989 until 1995.

The media mogul, who developed his investment in a radio station into a broadcasting empire that was the forerunner to Fox Television, bought the 77,000-acre estate - hailed by conservationists as a "jewel in the Cairngorms" - for his then wife Patricia, a former nude model and Baghdad belly dancer, so that his wife could become a near-neighbour of the Queen.

The couple, who paid a reputed 7 million for the estate, drew up extravagant plans for Mar Lodge, the 30-bedroom, granite-built mansion at the heart of the estate that had been built in 1896 for Princess Louise, Duchess of Fife, a grand daughter of Queen Victoria.

And before they took up residence Mrs Kluge, the daughter of a British policeman, courted royalty and entertained the Prince of Wales and Princess Diana on her husband's yacht and spent 60,000 of her husband's money on sponsoring the Royal Windsor Horse Show. She even used Mar Lodge as a base to set up her own carriage-driving team, led by the Duke of Edinburgh's former coachman, David Saunders, at a reported cost of 2m.

The Queen is said to have "steadfastly refused" to acknowledge her new neighbours and to have banned the Kluges from flying their helicopter over Balmoral for security reasons.

But, before the refurbishment was completed, allowing the couple to move in, it was announced in April 1990 that they were to divorce. In January 1991 Kluge announced plans to put the estate on the market but within a fortnight the historic hunting lodge was extensively damaged in a spectacular blaze believed to have been started deliberately.

The sale of the estate sparked a campaign to avoid the Mar Lodge remaining in private hands and to save the estate for the nation. A joint bid by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the John Muir Trust to buy the estate failed in 1992.

But secret government papers, released for the first time earlier this year, showed that the Royal Family took an active interest in the sale and that a conservation consortium, in which Prince Charles was involved, had failed to strike a deal with Mr Kluge because of "his reported dislike of their unbusinesslike attitude".

Mar Lodge was eventually bought by the National Trust for Scotland in 1995, following an anonymous donation of 4.5m.

Mr Kluge never returned to Scotland. He died on Tuesday at his home in Virginia.

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said the Royal Family had "nothing public to say" about his death.