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The end of a long marriage will naturally cause anguish, and Natasha Kaplinsky is said to be deeply sad about the end of her 20-year union with financier Justin Bower.
The former newsreader, who was the first winner of Strictly Come Dancing, has let it be known through friends that she is ‘utterly distressed’ and very much not the person ‘at fault’.
The split came some time ago. It can be revealed that the family home – a spectacular listed farm in Sussex which has a swimming pool, cinema room, an outdoor bath and 200 acres for their alpacas and goats – was quietly put up for sale at the start of June for £7million.
Their chalet ski lodge in France went on the market for £2.7million a few weeks before that.
The divorce, which they claimed this week is ‘ongoing’, appears to actually be close to completion.
‘We can confirm that we have made the joint decision to end our marriage and our focus now is on our children,’ they said in a statement this week to my colleague Richard Eden, who broke the story.
How sad that only three years after Kaplinsky, the first £1million news anchor, was musing out loud about wanting to renew their wedding vows, it is all over.
‘It’s been a couple of difficult years,’ says a friend. ‘We knew this was coming. They were unhappy; the unhappiness was obvious.’
Natasha Kaplinsky has let it be known through friends that she is ‘utterly distressed’ and very much not the person ‘at fault’ over the end of her marriage
There had been a number of recent traumas. First, a small boat Kaplinsky’s family had hired while on holiday in Corfu in 2018 went up in a fireball, badly injuring her and her daughter, then aged eight.
‘I was on a burning boat with everybody I loved, my parents, my husband, my children. I couldn’t leave that memory. It wouldn’t leave me. It felt biblical,’ she said. She was helped by eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Her daughter needed a year off school for treatment for burns to her face.
Not long after the family had started to recover from the life-changing experience, Bower fell seriously ill with Covid in March 2020.
She said in 2021: ‘It happened the first March when testing wasn’t really available. He just went downhill really badly, had a really high fever for ten days. I was actually genuinely quite frightened. I was changing his bed sheets every two hours. The paramedics arrived in full PPE. It was a very shocking experience and he took a long time to get better.’
He was one of the unlucky ones who went on to suffer from long Covid, and Kaplinsky added: ‘There are times when he literally just goes to bed for a week and feels dreadful.’
Meanwhile, she continued to work hard, commuting daily to work in London at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), of which she became president in 2022, and devoting every minute that she could to that and other endeavours.
‘My problem is that my answer to everything is invariably yes,’ she told an interviewer two years ago. ‘I’m often hideously overcommitted but then I absolutely love being manically busy. I actually find it stressful not having a really packed diary. Unless I’m busy, I feel like I’m wasting my time.’
The couple’s teenage children, son Arlo, now 18, and daughter Kika, 16, had become very good at feeding themselves, she said, adding brightly: ‘The children have become much better cooks than me out of necessity. They would starve otherwise. When I come in I may have some soup.’
So what went wrong in the marriage? While Kaplinsky’s side are adamant that no blame should be attached to her, her husband’s friends tell exactly the same story – that nobody should blame him.
They say that he is a good person who only ever wanted an ordinary, happy life – unlike his ambitious wife who always had her eyes fixed on the horizon.
People who know the couple, I’m told, are expecting this change in their circumstances to lead to Kaplinsky stepping into a new era of prominent good works, and storming back into the spotlight.
In fact, her role model seems to be the late and much-loved Dame Esther Rantzen, the trailblazing TV presenter, charity founder and campaigner, who died last month.
Kaplinsky’s feelings about the end of her 20-year union to Justin Bower are apparently deeply sad and heartfelt. The pair seen in 2019
Rantzen, a passionate advocate for assisted dying following her diagnosis with terminal lung cancer in 2023, knew, loved and supported Kaplinsky.
The women shared a Jewish heritage, similar tastes in fashion and a sometimes difficult relationship with the media, who put Rantzen through the wringer over her long affair with married BBC executive Desmond Wilcox, who went on to become her husband.
Rantzen got to know Kaplinsky on Strictly in 2004 and said: ‘Natasha has the misfortune of being extremely intelligent and beautiful, and some people won’t forgive her for it. But in my experience, she is straightforward and I think she is good at her job.’
Now Kaplinsky is apparently planning to pivot to her ‘Grande Dame era’.
She already has a number of impressive charity links. She was made an OBE in 2017 for her work on the Holocaust Commission, in which she interviewed 112 Holocaust survivors. She stepped away from her stellar career as a newsreader to do it after being personally asked by the then Prime Minister David Cameron. She includes the honour in her Instagram bio.
In all, she’s come a very long way from the time when she was known as ‘Spangles’ – the newsreader whose image became consumed by an alleged affair with her Strictly partner Brendan Cole.
For Kaplinsky is nothing if not serially unlucky in love. And for all her respectability, she weathered some tricky times – which might have sunk a lesser personality – before she settled down with Bower, a kindly banker.
She was born in Brighton in 1972 to South African parents. Her father, Raphie, was a Left-wing university professor, her mother a Jungian analyst.
Raphie had come to Britain as a political refugee, and moved the family to a remote Kenyan village when Natasha was a child partly because he missed Africa. They later returned to the UK.
She recalls realising as a child that they were exiles, their phones were tapped and her father was a figure of hate in his home country. Living in a Sussex village, they ‘were regarded with suspicion’, she says.
Her father worked as a professor of economics at Sussex University, and in her gap year she got a job in the offices of Neil Kinnock and John Smith before studying English literature at Oxford. She found it hard to fit in, struggling with the coursework and social life – she does not drink alcohol.
‘I didn’t get it, and it didn’t get me,’ she said of the university. She did, though, begin a romance with fellow student, Mike Barnard, who was to be her boyfriend for the next 12 years.
Kaplinsky was approached by the BBC to join Breakfast News as a presenter, a role with a salary of £210,000
Determined to make it with a career on TV, she took the classic route of working at the BBC as a secretary, before getting in front of the cameras at the cable station Talk TV.
From that stepping stone, Natasha managed to land a job as a junior reporter on the local news franchise Meridian, where she caught the eye of Lloyd Bracey, her married boss. He spent a great deal of time coaching Natasha, who had zero journalistic training, in how to make a good onscreen impression.
Natasha was quickly made a lead presenter, and within 15 months had moved on to ITV’s regional programme London Tonight, from where she was poached by Sky News in 2000.
It was her big break, but an unhappy period. One executive said that there was a view that she was ‘interested in being on the telly rather than being a journalist’.
Some grew impatient with her reported habit of bursting into tears during newsroom disagreements. She also fell out badly with Sky’s reigning Queen Bee, Kay Burley.
The story went that Burley read emails about herself on Kaplinsky’s computer, discussing Burley’s alleged plastic surgery.
‘It was unbearable between them after that,’ recalled a source. ‘Kaplinsky was in tears every day.’
Her salvation came with an approach from the BBC in 2002 to join Breakfast News, and a salary of £210,000.
Her new life in a dream job was rudely disrupted by a Sunday newspaper story which claimed that although she was living with Mike Barnard, her long-term boyfriend, she was spending weekends in Brighton with her old boss at Meridian, Lloyd Bracey.
Kaplinsky declared herself ‘mortified’, saying she had made an ‘error of judgment’, and publicly rededicated herself to Barnard.
Then the BBC persuaded her to take part in its new show, Strictly Come Dancing, in 2004. Kaplinsky was highly reluctant and even tried to injure herself by falling off a pavement to turn her ankle.
However, the public was transfixed every Saturday night, not least because of her onscreen flirtation with dance partner Brendan Cole.
He split from his fiancée, dancer Camilla Dallerup – in what became the first instance of what is now known as the ‘Strictly Curse.’
Natasha has come a very long way from when she was known as ‘Spangles’ – the newsreader whose image was consumed by an alleged affair with her Strictly instructor Brendan Cole
Kaplinsky finally split from Barnard, and then she and Brendan won the competition.
She always denied there was anything romantic between them, but those who know her well are convinced that there was a short romance. One remembers that during lunchtimes on the show, Natasha would sit on Brendan’s lap.
Brendan himself hinted there was something between them on a radio show. He said: ‘Camilla left me three weeks into the show, the night she got kicked off.
‘I still remember, she stood there in the line-up and it gets down to Camilla and David Dickinson, and myself and Kaplinsky.
‘They announced that we were safe and Camilla and David were leaving. And, you know, your natural reaction to news like that is you go like, you know, “We’re safe”. She took that as, “You unsupportive so-and-so”.’
Revealing how he and Natasha became ‘extremely close’, he admitted: ‘The chemistry was there, plain for all to see.’
He added: ‘I didn’t have an affair. Camilla chose to leave. Once you do something, after that it’s not an affair.’
Natasha was greatly embarrassed by the stories, and parted company with her agent Jon Roseman who described her was ‘the most difficult person I had ever worked with’. He let her know via a couriered letter that he was dropping her as a client.
She went on to present the BBC’s Children in Need telethons and was even trusted to anchor the BBC’s always-tricky New Year’s Eve show.
Although she had her critics, Kaplinsky was recruited to help relaunch Channel 5’s news programme in 2007, starting in 2008 as the highest-paid newsreader in British history, on a stunning salary of £1million a year.
By now she had settled down with Justin Bower after a whirlwind romance. They were married at Babington House in Somerset in August 2005, after a three-month engagement.
Reports suggested that the high-earning bride had set wedding planners a modest budget of £15,000. That sounds unlikely as she and Bower lived in lavish style, clearly evidenced by their enormous home which they renovated from top to bottom over the 12 years that they lived there.
Natasha added six dogs to the equation plus two pygmy goats, three sheep, nine alpacas and a cow called Mabel. She seems to have curiously few good friends in the TV world and has a reputation for being very guarded socially, almost to the point of being chilly.
In that she is unlike Esther Rantzen, whose forceful sociability was legendary.
Esther was, of course, sustained professionally by her long and happy marriage to her ‘darling Dessie’, an accomplished documentary maker who taught her much about the world of television, and who had been her boss.
One wonders if Natasha Kaplinsky will find herself a new, suitable, consort.
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