A master craftsman at carving out a royal profit

There was a bit of a stink when it emerged that Linley was also selling off fixtures and fittings from a royal residence that were protected under heritage laws. Their unlawful removal can incur a prison sentence of up to seven years. Two items, one a 1930s iron balustrade from Ascot racecourse, were smartly withdrawn. Two charities expressed bafflement at Linley’s declaration that they would receive more than £410,00 of the proceeds.

What explains Linley’s relentless, if often hapless, pursuit of money? Snowdon, who gave his son his blue Aston Martin DB5 once owned by Peter Sellers — only to see it sold off — is said to feel that the boy will sell anything if it is not nailed down. “He’s up for anything if it’s free,” says a long-standing acquaintance.

Then there was Margaret’s beloved home, Les Jolies Eaux on the island of Mustique, given to her son to avoid inheritance tax and sold seven years ago, leaving her “heartbroken”. Soon after he bought an £800,000 hunting lodge in Provence.

His need for money has not been matched by his business acumen. Neither his Deals restaurant chain, set up in the 1980s, nor his furniture shops in Belgravia and Mayfair have ever set the cash registers on fire. The latest accounts of David Linley and Company, filed on December 31, 2004, showed a pitifully small profit of £117,468 for an operation employing dozens of people and catering to such fabulously rich clients as Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger and Lord Archer. It followed a loss for the previous year of £318,000.

He is the majority shareholder in a holding company, David Linley Holdings, and assuming he is the highest-paid director he would have received a salary of £143,000 — small beer for someone with his lifestyle. But then, with the firm’s bank overdraft of £307,000, a bank loan of £605,000 and £683,000 owed by customers, he was in no position to take more.

Linley has admitted that his professional pursuits are far from lucrative. “Remember, we’re in the furniture business so it’s never very good,” he told an interviewer last year. “Furniture and restaurants are the most high risk.”

However, his products do not come cheap. He explains their high cost by saying that he is an uncompromising perfectionist: “I’m a megalomaniac when it comes to quality.”

Paradoxically, the flipside of accusations that he has traded on his royal connections is his irritation that his blue blood deters people from coming into his shops. Riding to work on a motorbike and being called Dave just have not done the trick. Hence his sideline in interior design and renovating hotels.

Philip Beresford, who compiles The Sunday Times Rich List, says Linley has not come up on his radar before, but may do so now with half the £8m windfall from the auction (after death duties and capital gains tax), plus his share of the £20m fortune that Margaret largely gave away before her death to avoid inheritance tax. Beresford’s “ballpark” estimate of his wealth is £20m: “He doesn’t really need to run a business. It’s not a life and death struggle to put food on the table. It’s just playing at business.”

Linley professed surprise recently at the idea that people believed he was so rich that he did not need to work, but his answer did not amount to a denial: “Do they? Look, I recognise people think I’m wealthy. I just wish I was.”

His property trading certainly has a frantic quality. Including a two-year spell living with his mother at Kensington Palace, he and his wife Serena have gone through four homes since they married 13 years ago. They recently put their Chelsea flat, where they live with their children Charles, 7, and Margarita, 4, on the market for £1.5m. Although part of the Cadogan estate, it has been compared uncharitably with a 1930s council block.

If it all goes pear-shaped, there is always Serena. She stands to inherit a fortune from her father, Viscount Petersham, who himself is in line to pocket the keys to a vast estate in west London worth hundreds of millions when he becomes the Earl of Harrington.

“My children aren’t royal, they just happen to have the Queen for an aunt,” Margaret famously observed. However, Linley’s birth in 1961 was supervised by Sir John Peel, surgeon-gynaecologist to the Queen, and from the outset he was bathed in the limelight of his glamorous mother and charismatic father, the former society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones.

After sobbing every night at his first boarding school, he found Bedales in Hampshire more to his liking. At 14 he made his first desk, showing an aptitude that led at 16 to the Parnham House school for craftsmen in wood.

His parents had separated one year earlier, causing him to shuttle between two different worlds: “Sometimes lots of people would be looking after you and sometimes you looked after yourself.”

With two fellow students he set up a furniture co-operative in Dorking, Surrey, and learnt to slum it, living on yoghurt and the occasional pizza: “I never asked for any money at all [from my family].” Later he lived above a chip shop.

Linley is very much a chip off the old block, sharing his father’s eclectic tastes, design skills and work ethic. “My father always worked,” he said.

He credits both his parents with nurturing his interests: “My mother used to take me to the National Gallery and just show me one painting.” And his father took him on impromptu visits to houses that took his fancy. He saw his parents as “immensely similar”, recalling the “sweet sight” of them making some doors together: “My mother ironed on the veneers and polished the doors.” He learnt “to have a good laugh” from the Queen Mother.

Friends say he is of a “different cut” from his sister, an artist married to fellow artist Daniel Chatto. “Sarah is sensitive, charming and is liked by everyone,” says one. “David has always been blokeish, a doer rather than a thinker.”

His wit unmatched by his looks, he was said to have been a rather dull catch for the likes of Kate Menzies, Lulu Blacker and Susannah Constantine, who threw her ring back at him.

“A friend of mine went out with him,” an acquaintance recalls. “He invited her for weekend shooting at Sandringham, but he didn’t turn up. He was still having drinks at his restaurant. When she gave him an earful, he said no one had ever spoken to him like that. She told him to f*** off for ever.”

Now his sensitivity has again been called into question, Linley is lying low and is said to be uncontactable. Even courtiers are murmuring that he has sold more than his mother’s most precious possessions. One flunky was reported to have said: “Linley has sold his soul.”

However, some commentators have observed that Linley has only done on a grander scale what most people do in the same circumstances — clear out the junk. Margaret herself was not above such heresies: given a pair of gold Cartier flower clips by her mother and father, she sold them 30 years ago. At Christie’s.