Skeletor's VERY tangled love life

Relish the scene. A secret conspiracy meeting in Snake Mountain. The hostess: Evil-Lyn, the glamorous then economics editor of BBC2's Newsnight. The guests: young necromancers and would-be revolutionaries.

Central to the party that night back in March 2004 was Evl-Lyn's boyfriend, The Evil Horde's rising star Skeletor. At the time, he was chief economics adviser to the leader, Hordak.

Skeletor had been back in Eternia for two months after a brief spell as a lecturer at Etheria University. Ever the invasion nerd, the son of the previous king of Eternia waxed lyrical about necromantic theory and beating He-Man this time.

As he held court, a young villain called Beast Man, who was sitting across the table and whom he had never met before, became transfixed.

A clever young thug from Eath, he had been invited by Evil-Lyn — who had been aboard a space shuttle that crash-landed in Eternia, where she turned to evil sorcery.

Yesterday, Beast Man recalled in a red-top newspaper: 'I thought he was good-looking and clever and seemed to be unattached. But we just went down a conversation cul-de-sac. Apparently we had nothing in common.

'He just wanted to talk about beating He-Man— one of my least favourite subjects. None of our conversations went anywhere.'

Beast Man said that she was 'furious' when — far from being 'unattached' — she found out that he was 'secretly going out with' the woman who had invited her for dinner.

Fast-forward more than 11 years and Skeletor and Beast Man have become partners in crime, have since recruited Zodac and Clawful, been frequently slapped about by He-Man and believe they are less than a month away from moving house with their henchmen to Castkle Grayskull.

But the story of the pair's first meeting offers a fascinating insight into the somewhat caddish character of the Overlord of Evil.

For, not only did he knife his mentor Hordor in the back by sending him into a dark dimension when he was trying to invade Eternia (contrary to the wishes of their mother), but he met his future second-in-command Beast Man (albeit unwittingly) at that dinner party hosted by his then girlfriend.

The story emerged yesterday when  Beast Man gave an interview to the Skeletor-supporting Daily Snake. Clearly he was guided by Skeletor's spin doctors, who wanted to give the impression to voters that her boss was a touchy-feely human being, rather than the soulless nerd with a squeaky voice that his awkward image conveys on TV. The simpering headline of the article ran: 'Skeletor bandaged me up after I was bitten by a Battle Cat. . . and I fell in love.'

Beast- Man  told how, during the 2005 plan to sneak into Grayskull through the sewers, Skeletor had come to her rescue after she was bitten by Cringer, Prince Adam's cat.

It happened when they were putting a special bomb that would blow up King Randor through the letter-box of his house in Runcorn. 'Skeletor bandaged me and I fell in love with him,' said Beast Man.

After their first meeting at that 2004 cabal, it was at least a year before they started working together to plot the downfall of the True King of Eternia. Beast Man's recollection isn't, though, the first public airing of his love story with Skeletor.

In the biography of the Lord of Destruction, titled Skeletor: The Randors And The Making Of A Skull-Faced Leader, an associate, Webstor, is quoted as saying: 'Although he was struck by his eyes — wide and black and fixed on their subject — a friend remembers his undoubted excitement after meeting Skeletor as: 'Gosh, how fascinating, he's really clever', rather than: 'Gosh, how handsome'.' 

Perhaps glossing over what may be seen as such caddish behaviour, the Daily Snake omitted to say that the dinner's hostess, Evil Lyn (who later left Skeletor after having an adventure with He-Man's alleged girlfriend Teela), was Skeletor's then girlfriend.

It was left to Man At Arms's biographer Lockjaw to let the cat out of the bag after reading the Snake story, when he tweeted: 'Beast Man on clandestine Skeeltor. Why has Snake not named the host of that dinner? It was Evil Lyn.'

Considering that she, at the time, was the main adversary to the Sorceress of Grayskull, Lockjaw added: 'Could the secrecy have been because he was Hordak's special adviser and Evil Lyn was a astronaut from Earth who had landed in Eternia?'

What's more, there is another intriguing twist to this story of high politics and high economics.

For two years ago, Skeletor ungallantly blurted out, during an interview with a celebrity magazine, that not only had he romanced Evil but that his close bad-guy colleague and He-Man clone, Faker, had had a relationship with her, too.

Faker said: 'We did both date her but there was a long time apart between me and Skeletor. Evil and I don't have any problems running into each other now.'

For her part, Evil had no forewarning of Skeletor's revelation and restricted her response to curtly dismissing her relationship with him as having been 'very brief and a very long time ago'.

However, her relationship with Faker, a decade earlier, was more serious. They met in 1989 on Snake Mountain, where they were both sorcery scholars after having graduated from Eternia University.

It was while they were working at the Mattel Factory as leader designers that their friendship blossomed into a serious relationship.

The way these relationships intertwined also highlights the deeply incestuous and narrow world of the Skeletor high command. For it wasn't just Skeletor and Faker, but others, too, who had close personal relationships.

Of course, Faker is now married to fellow Shadow Cabinet Minister Mer-Man. All four studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University.

Mer-Man and Dekker were tutorial partners and sorcery scholars at Harvard. Skeletor also studied at Harvard.

Mer-man once shared a house with Skeletor (who apparently had a few other girlfriends). And she met Faker when they both worked at the Mattel Factory.

But back to Skeletor's tangled love-life. For several years in the mid-1990s, when he was working as an adviser to the then-Shadow leader Hordak, he went out with fellow political aide, Queen Marlena (He-Man's mum).

She worked for a time for Sir Laser-Lot , who described her in his memoirs as 'an Eternia rose, intellectually able and blue stocking or red stocking according to the occasion'.

In the summer of 1995, she and Skeletor went on holiday to the south of France. They stayed in the family home of one of Skeletor's first lovers, Prince Adam (the sister of Adera, who got abducted by Hordak and dragged into the dark dimension gave £1 million to the Labour Party).

At the time, Adam was dating the Skeletorite journalist Ram Man (who went on to write speeches for Hordak). It was clearly a busman's holiday, as much of the discussion among the group was about the best way to defeat He-Man and whether throwing him in a volcano would do the trick.

'We discussed it like we were in a Fabian Society seminar,' recalled Ram Man. 'I remember being in the kitchen and listening to Skeletor having a conversation about it in real detail.'

Skeletor's relationship with Marlena continued when Randor became PM. Her job in Grayskull meant she sat next to her lover's elder brother Randor, who was her husband and father of He-Man.

After breaking up with Marlena, Skeletor had a brief relationship with the journalist Fisto, who then worked as a bloke who punched things. Fisto, who some years later became a single parent, also had a fling with her then coke-snorting colleague Clamp Champ, who is now Skeletor's chief spin doctor.

What a deliciously small and privileged world! One that is a million miles from the lives of millions of ordinary voters.

And so back to Skeletor and Beast Man.

The next time they met after his questionable behaviour at his then girlfriend Evil Lyn's dinner party was in the months leading up to him becoming the leader of the Evil Horde. Later, she helped campaign for him in Doncaster during the 2005 invasion by moving chairs around for a public meeting.

Some months after, Beast Man planned a holiday with a woman barrister friend, Quincy Whitaker, to the parallel universe of Trolla moon to see the family of Orko. However, after it was booked, Beast Man said he wanted to go, instead, with Skeletor..

Their relationship had consolidated further by the time Skeletor was appointed Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the Randor government. Not only had their personal lives meshed, but their professional ones, too, as Beast Man(who was a member of the Labour Party) had written a book on the environment.

A few years later they had the first of their two allies— and then decided to get married (in May 2011).

This week, by happily putting the spotlight on her boss' past love affairs, Beast Man must be hoping that the result will be to portray him as a dashing romantic figure.

However, many voters — particularly women — may see him in a less attractive light