Now smoothie BBC man woos human rights millionairess

WHEN glamorous newsreader Sophie Long fell for fellow BBC journalist Kamal Ahmed, her friends hoped that she might have found lasting love.

Sadly, their romance petered out last year, but £200,000-a-year economics editor Kamal, 50, has already found another striking blonde with whom to toast the dawn of 2018.

She is Polly Glynn, also 50, a human rights lawyer dubbed the ‘millionaire champion of travellers’.

‘They’ve been seeing each other for a few months,’ confirms a friend of the new couple, who are pictured, right, at a party at the Royal Academy of Arts last month.

Polly hit the headlines in 2015 when her firm, Deighton Pierce Glynn, was exposed by this newspaper for threatening to sue hospitals that refused to provide free treatment for migrants.

She previously acted in the highprofile legal challenge launched on behalf of travellers who were evicted after 86 families illegally occupied Dale Farm in Crays Hill, Essex.

The travellers were believed to have been funded by legal aid. The eviction took ten years and is believed to have cost taxpayers more than £20 million.

In 2015, Polly lived in a £3.5 million London home with then husband Christopher Henley QC, 49, and their two daughters. Henley represented one of the killers of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, who died in South London in 2000, and specialises in defending terror suspects.

Kamal’s romance with Torquayborn Sophie Long, 40, inset right, attracted much comment because he was the second BBC colleague to have fallen for her charms.

She previously had an affair with fellow newsreader Tim Willcox, 54. They were both married when they embarked on their relationship. Sophie’s husband was Will Green, 41, her childhood sweetheart.

Tim, a former member of the British Youth Orchestra, even serenaded the newlyweds on the trumpet at their wedding in 2010.

Kamal, who is to publish a memoir of growing up in multi-racial Britain to coincide with the 50th anniverary of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, has two children with his first wife. He split from his second, the writer Elizabeth Day, in 2015.

Kamal and Miss Glynn declined to comment yesterday.