The VERY glamorous background of Richard Hammond's new love: After Top Gear star was 'blindsided' by sudden divorce, OLIVIA KEMP reveals the surprising past of low-key therapist and school governor who has captured his heart

When Richard Hammond revealed he had found love again following the collapse of his 23-year marriage, his new girlfriend appeared to represent a decisive change of gear.

After almost three decades in which cars dominated both his professional and private life – bringing him immense wealth and fame, but also two terrifying crashes and, according to friends, considerable strain at home – the former Top Gear presenter had fallen for a reassuringly low-key ‘therapist and school governor’.

‘Everyone calls her Kiki,’ he recently explained of Keira Glen, the 53-year-old divorced mother of two whom he says he met through a mutual friend.

His life, he claims, is now filled with early suppers, country walks and quiet evenings in front of the television.

Yet there is considerably more to his elegant new companion than first appeared.

For I can reveal that Kiki is the great-granddaughter of the founder of one of Britain’s most venerable engineering businesses, part of a family dynasty whose company turned over almost £88million last year.

And, in another unexpected twist, she was formerly married to the Hon Richard Hugh Eaton Newall – the eldest son and heir apparent of the 2nd Baron Newall.

Had their marriage endured until his eventual succession, Kiki would have become Baroness Newall, conventionally styled Lady Newall.

Hammond, therefore, has chosen a partner whose family has spent more than a century making its money from engines and machinery – albeit of a more practical variety than his supercars.

Kiki is the daughter of Robert Duncan Glen, the co-owner of the Bicester-based engineering group E P Barrus Ltd, and the great-granddaughter of its American founder, Ernest Prouty Barrus.

It is a substantial operation spanning marine engines, garden machinery and a submersible engine system developed for the Armed Forces.

Accounts for the year ending September 2025 show turnover of £87.7million, a profit after tax of just over £2million and net assets of £30.3million.

Last year, Kiki joined Robert and her elder sister Tara on the board, becoming the fourth generation involved in the business.

Her father resides at Forest Hill House, a handsome Grade II-listed property in the county, while the company’s headquarters stand, rather fittingly, on a road called Glen Way.

Yet Kiki’s background, for all its privilege, has not prevented her from constructing a varied career away from the family firm.

Having begun in finance as a client manager at JP Morgan, she became a teacher and later retrained as a therapist.

She now works with adults and children, charging from £75 for counselling and £65 for professional supervision.

Her website says she has experience helping ‘highly successful sportspeople and professionals’ experiencing depression, loss, health concerns, identity problems and men’s issues.

Areas of expertise which strike an uncanny chord with Hammond's own experiences for few television stars, after all, have undergone physical and emotional upheaval on his scale.

In 2006, while filming Top Gear at a disused Yorkshire airfield, the jet-powered dragster he was driving overturned at 288mph after a tyre burst.

He was airlifted to hospital with a serious brain injury and, for a time, it was unclear whether he would survive.

His ex-wife Mindy scarcely left his bedside while he lay in a coma. Afterwards, she insisted that the ordeal had strengthened their marriage, saying: ‘We were lucky. I’m forever grateful that our marriage survived where others have disintegrated. It sounds terribly naff, but I really do believe it has made us stronger.’

Yet in 2019, Mindy described how her husband’s personality had changed as he became prone to depression, mood swings and sudden flashes of anger.

‘One particularly unpleasant moment came at the breakfast table,’ she recalled. ‘I watched as his face morphed into a raft of different expressions, changing second by second.

‘Then, one summer’s afternoon, Richard turned to me and said: “Get the girls and get out of the house now.” I told him to relax, but he said: “No, just get out.” He could feel the anger welling up, and was afraid that he might not be able to control himself.’

Eleven years after the first accident, Hammond was airlifted to hospital once again when he crashed an electric supercar while filming The Grand Tour in Switzerland.

Although he managed to climb from the vehicle seconds before it burst into flames, he suffered a broken knee.

For years afterwards, Hammond remained effusive about the wife who had nursed him through both disasters.

‘I’m very lucky, I married my best friend,’ he previously said of Mindy. ‘I know that sounds really cheesy, but she genuinely is. We understand one another better than anyone else does.’

By 2024, however, that understanding had seemingly been stretched beyond its limit.

Sources close to the family told the Daily Mail that Hammond was ‘blindsided’ when Mindy told him that their 28-year relationship was over, despite her having warned him eight years earlier that he was on his ‘last chance’.

‘It was a case that he didn’t really think it would ever happen,’ one source explained. ‘But Mindy has been through so much, she has had to pick up the pieces so many times.’

Another added: ‘Richard had two really horrid smashes and things like that change you. For Mindy, she has had to nurse him, care for him, as well as being a mother to their daughters.’

When their separation was announced publicly in January 2025, the couple said: ‘Our marriage is coming to an end, but we’ve had an amazing 28 years together and two incredible daughters. We will always be in each other’s lives and are proud of the family we created.’

For Hammond, the ending of the marriage coincided with other profound losses.

His father Alan died at the age of 80, while The Grand Tour – and with it his two-decade on-screen partnership with Clarkson and James May – also came to a close.

‘It wasn’t a brilliant time,’ Hammond has since conceded, before adding: ‘But these are the things that come to us in our fifties, aren’t they?’

He moved out of Bollitree Castle, the £7million mock-Gothic Herefordshire home he and Mindy bought in 2008, and entered a wilderness period in a rented cottage ‘in the middle of nowhere.’

The divorce also forced him to sell two treasured Porsche 911s.

Kiki, too, knows something herself of dismantling an established family life.

Her marriage to Newall ended when their daughters Olivia and Alexia, now 26 and 24, were teenagers. Both went on to study at Durham University before entering sports partnerships and finance respectively.

Hammond’s daughters Izzy, 25, and Willow, 23, are similar ages, giving the couple the shared delicate business of blending two families of grown-up young women.

‘Richard is having fun and really appreciates he’s lucky to have someone he shares such a spark with,’ a friend told the Mail after they were first pictured together. ‘He wasn’t expecting to get into a relationship so quickly, but he’s not complaining. It’s early days, but they’re happy to see where it goes with no pressure.’

Their relationship first became visible in September 2025 when Hammond took Kiki to the opening of luxury penmaker Yard-O-Led’s first store in Piccadilly.

The couple posed together for photographs alongside guests including Mary Berry and This Morning presenter Ben Shephard, although Kiki’s identity – and remarkably gilded history – passed largely unnoticed.

Now, however, the pair have settled into altogether more comfortable domesticity near Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, where Hammond has bought a six-bedroom Georgian manor house for a sum understood to be just below its £2.25million asking price.

Reportedly purchased in cash, it has a tennis court, wine cellar and – inevitably – outbuildings large enough for his cars.

It is also within reach of The Smallest Cog, the classic-car restoration business Hammond runs near Hereford.

And the pair have already become familiar faces in the town’s supermarkets and pubs.

‘They come here all the time, at least ten times since they moved here,’ one member of staff told the Daily Mail.

Hammond has since described Kiki as ‘the best thing that’s going on for me’ and revealed that his new routine includes golf, running and wild swimming as he prepares to attempt a small triathlon.

It is a gentler life than the one which made him famous, though it would be premature to conclude that Hammond has left horsepower behind for good.

Having lost his marriage, his father, his television partnership, his home and two beloved Porsches in quick succession, he has seemingly found happiness with a woman who understands the emotional cost of starting over – but whose aristocratic past, enviable inheritance and family attachment to engines make her altogether more intriguing than the description ‘therapist and school governor’ first suggests.