Jailed: Queen’s relative convicted of drunken sex attack in castle
Radio presenter Nicky Campbell reveals to Hannah Stephenson how Labrador Maxwell eventually became his four-legged therapist
A RELATIVE of the Queen has been jailed for 10 months for sexually assaulting a woman at his ancestral home.
Simon Bowes-lyon (34), the Earl of Strathmore, pleaded guilty to attacking a woman at Glamis Castle in Angus in February last year.
Bowes-lyon, the son of a cousin of the Queen, was sentenced at Dundee Sheriff Court.
Previous hearings were told the attack happened in a bedroom at the castle.
The court heard the woman was attending a three-day public relations event at the castle and had gone to bed when a “drunk” Bowes-lyon went to her room at around 1.20am, persuaded her to open the door and forced his way in before pushing her on the bed and sexually assaulted her.
Sheriff Alastair Carmichael told Bowes-lyon: “Throughout all of this, she made it clear that she wanted you to stop. She told you repeatedly that she had a boyfriend, repeatedly told you to leave and repeatedly had to keep pushing you away from her, all of which you ignored.
“Once she’d managed to eject you from her bedroom, you returned to the door and pleaded with her to let you back in.”
The sheriff said the attack and Bowes-lyon’s refusal to leave lasted 20 minutes.
His victim locked the bedroom door and wedged a chair under the handle to prevent him from returning.
The incident left her “upset, afraid and shaking”.
NICKY Campbell was at breaking point. He had just finished his Radio 5 live breakfast show, talking to politicians and callers. But he was inwardly obsessing about a story he’d read about a family of elephants being killed by a train in India.
Campbell might have gone through the motions of the broadcast, but he admits now that he was weeping inside, racked by a pain that felt worse than physical.
Stumbling out of the building in what he describes as a “zombie march” down Euston Road in London, he arrived at his station and collapsed to his knees, sobbing on a small patch of grass near the entrance.
He phoned his wife, Tina, got a cab home and sought medical help. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
He discusses the effect it has had on him in his new book, One of the Family, and how his faithful golden Labrador, Maxwell, brought him solace.
“When I had my little breakdown at Euston Station, Tina said, ‘Come back, come and see Maxwell’,” he says.
“Of course I wanted to see Tina and the girls (they have four daughters), but there was this four-legged magical thing that will not know anything but will know everything; that will not understand but will be completely empathetic; won’t know what’s going on but will somehow completely understand. I won’t need to say anything — he won’t ask any questions.”
Meeting Campbell today on Zoom, the broadcaster seems as down-to-earth and controlled as ever, not the struggling figure on the grass he was in 2013.
“Everything just got on top of me. It was boiling up inside and I just went. It was a very out-ofbody experience, with people walking past me, almost stepping over me,” he remembers.
“People must have thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s the guy who used to do Wheel of Fortune, lying there weeping’. Maybe they thought I was praying.”
After the breakdown, his GP referred him to a psychiatrist, and the revelation was agony.
“It’s tough hearing yourself give voice to it all because you feel like a fool, like it’s another person talking. A part of you is rolling your eyes and saying, ‘Get a grip, weirdo’. I told him everything: the obsessions, fixations, the manic missions, the terrible lows, deep depressions and despair,” Campbell writes.
Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder was actually a relief, he recalls, and says he was lucky to find the help that he did: “People have depression and mental health issues, especially now. So many people are suffering so badly. They may only get 10 minutes with their GP, but I had four or five sessions (with a psychiatrist) before he said, ‘This is what you have and this is what you need’.
“Diagnosis and prescription is vital. I was lucky I was able to get that time. I weep for people who don’t have the opportunity.”
His bipolar disorder also gave him a connection to his birth mother, who also had it.
Campbell (59) has written previously about his adoption by Edinburgh couple Sheila and Frank Campbell, who gave him a loving family environment. But being adopted had long made him feel like an imposter who didn’t belong, who wasn’t wanted, who harboured “gnawing feelings of abandonment”, despite the fact his adoptive family loved him dearly and gave him all the warmth and security any child would need.
He traced and met his birth mother, Stella, an Irish nurse, when he was 29, but pushed her away, feeling there was no connection, and didn’t read the many letters she sent him over the years until after she died.
“She was incredibly persistent, but I had terrible things going on in my life at the time. I just couldn’t spin those plates. She wanted to be my mum and she wasn’t. I was looking for reasons to understand stuff. I had an amazing (adoptive) mum.” he says.
Working with co-presenter Davina Mccall on 10 series of Long Lost Family made him feel he needed to open up about himself in One of the Family.
“It was a tortuous, all-consuming process to write it, but having done so, it’s good to share these things with people. We ask people to open up, so it would be a bit hypocritical if we weren’t, when required, as candid as we possibly can be about feelings and about life,” the presenter explains.”
He acknowledges that he’s on medication for his bipolar disorder indefinitely — “I still get obsessions and hyper-focused. I have doldrum days, but I know why it’s happening.”
His dogs — first Candy, a piebald fox terrier cross and, later, Maxwell, who has been part of the Campbell family since 2008 — enriched his life.
“From the minute he came through the door, was meant to be. I could never have had any other dog. Maxwell and I are inseparable,” he says.
Maxwell still helps support Campbell on bad days. “I just touch him or smell his ears, and get a rush of wellbeing and security inside of me” he says.
“It’s a deep-seated emotional and psychological trigger that makes me feel better. He’s my four-legged therapist.”
‘I touch him or smell his ears, and I get a rush of wellbeing and security inside’