GIVEN its royal provenance, its value is probably about half a million pounds. But you can have it for £19 at any branch of Asda.
The US-owned supermarket chain announced yesterday that it would be selling look-alike copies of the engagement ring, once owned by the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, that the Prince of Wales gave to Camilla Parker Bowles last week.
The imitations will go on sale at Asda’s 195 instore jewellery counters around April 8, the date of the royal wedding. They will be fashioned from sterling silver and zircon, a man-made diamond of minimal intrinsic worth.
“The ring has gone down very well with the public,” an Asda spokesman said last night. “We have had a lot of requests for copies and our jewellery buyers have been able to come up with a bargain. We expect it to sell well with mums and grans, and anyone who wants an unusual piece of jewellery if they are going out at the weekend.”
If a £19 copy is just too Gerald Ratner for words, Asda is prepared to go a few steps closer to the real thing. It is willing to take orders for a copy made from platinum and containing 4.8 carats of diamonds — compared with the 8 carats of the original. At £30,000, anyone who places an order will be buying the most expensive item to be offered in an Asda store.
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“Camilla’s ring is a timeless classic and we want our customers to have a taste of royalty for a fraction of the price,” Justine Reid, Asda’s jewellery buyer, said yesterday.
Asprey & Garrard, the Crown jeweller, and Sotheby’s, the auction house, declined to put a value on the original ring yesterday but it is thought to be worth about £500,000.
Its main square-cut diamond is large but of only average quality; its royal history, however, would push its value far above its real worth if it were ever auctioned.
The ring, made in London in the 1920s and very much in the fashion of that period, is believed to have been given by the future George VI to his wife when she was pregnant with the present Queen.