Michael Howard's relationship with Celia Haddon surprised his friends As the former leader of the Conservative Party, Lord Howard has always been circumspect about his private life. At the service of thanksgiving at St Bride's in Fleet Street for the life of the great former Telegraph foreign correspondendent Ronnie Payne, attended by such figures as Lord Lamont and innumerable Fleet Street luminaries, Howard admitted why he was there. "I used to go out with Celia Haddon, Ronnie's widow," he told Mandrake in the presence of his wife, Sandra. I remained friends with both of them - Ronnie was, in his own way, as hugely entertaining as she was. Paulene Stone, the former model who has known Sandra since she was 18, and has since been close to Howard, said she was "startled" by Howard's admission. "Honestly, I had no idea," she said. I suppose you learn things at funerals and memorial services that would otherwise remain secret. Payne, who died in May, aged 87, met Celia in the Seventies, and, despite his aversion to cats - and her obsession with them - their union lasted until his dying day. Payne wrote an amusing book entitled 100 Ways to Live With a Cat Addict. Mandrake remembers Payne as an engagingly open luncheon companion, but on one issue he always refused to be drawn. Did he have a hand in an improbable pets" column that his wife had written for the Telegraph in which she had attested that cats can sit on lavatory seats, and could even, with training, pull the chord to flush them at the appropriate moments? "I am conscious you have been going on about this, but I can provide proof," Celia assured me, when I somewhat indelicately raised the issue as I was leaving St Bride's. Cats can be trained to do just about anything. To be fair, when I first raised the issue, readers sent me pictures of their cats on lavatories which, for reasons of good taste and regard for the privacy of the cats concerned, I declined to publish in the newspaper.