So what attracted an Uzbek beauty to a Dragons’ Den star 31 YEARS her senior who’s worth £175m
DUNCAN Bannatyne’s very new and very young girlfriend thinks fate is a funny thing. Well she might. Little more than three months ago, 35-year- old Nigora Whitehorn was slumming it in a far from palatial £200,000 terrace house backing onto a Pound Zone store in Dunstable, Bedfordshire.
Then, lo and behold, 66-year-old former Dragons’ Den’s TV personality Bannatyne entered the Harley Street dental practice where she was working on reception.
Today, Nigora (who claims to be the daughter of ‘royalty’, ‘celebrities’ and goodness knows who else in her native Uzbekistan), is living it up in his stunning holiday home on the Algarve, where the besotted entrepreneur can’t keep his hands off her.
He is ‘madly in love’, feels like ‘an excited schoolboy’ and wants to marry her, the divorced single mother to 13-year- old Gabrielle tells me.
And Nigora? Well, she’s chucked in her job, handed back the house keys to her former husband and . . . let’s just say I’m beginning to worry she’ll wrinkle that pretty face of hers, given how widely she’s grinning.
‘I absolutely adore Duncan,’ she lisps in a wondrous take-zoze- cloze- off- dahlink accent. ‘ He is the most softest, amazing, kind person. My words are not going to be good enough to describe him.’
Shall we help her out? Maybe try 534th on the Sunday Times Rich List? Or owner of a £175 million fortune? Her brow creases.
‘It really upsets me when people judge me, saying: “Oh, how come someone so young and beautiful all of a sudden is in love with millionaire Duncan Bannatyne?” ‘You fall in love with someone for their personality, for their character, for their charm and charisma. Age is just age. I adore Duncan as a person and I think that’s what deep love is about.’ When did she realise this is what it was? ‘Straight away,’ she says. ‘But I believe in fate. It is so funny.’ Which it probably is, unless you are another of Bannatyne’s very young but not quite so new girlfriends.
Beauty queen Michelle Evans, 37, had been dating the twice-divorced businessman for seven months when photographs of him on a night out with Nigora appeared in the Press.
She dumped him on Twitter, using his Dragons’ Den catchphrase: ‘ I’m out.’ Following their acrimonious split, the former Miss Great Britain claimed the famously irascible millionaire had threatened to leak naked photographs of her if she caused trouble.
She also accused him of tight-fistedness, insisting he had grumbled over the cost of a £16 parking fee and gave her a £20 gift box from his own spa for Christmas, wrapped in a Morrisons supermarket bag.
‘She was silly going around saying all this stuff to the newspapers, which is absolute diabolical,’ says Nigora. ‘ He was upset and bothered because of what I would think about him.
‘When she said “He made us split the bill”, it was ridiculous. He said: “I’ve never done this. You can look at my bank statements.”
‘I said: “Darling, you don’t need to explain anything.” ’
Instead, Nigora decided to look at Bannatyne’s astrological chart. ‘I’m an Aries. Though Duncan is Aquarius, he was born with his moon in Aries so he’s very forceful as well. We’re quite similar.
‘When I met Duncan we were immediately friends, though he said to me from the time we met: “I’m madly in love.” I thought he was joking but then, when we went out a few times, I looked at his astrology.
‘I wanted to know what he was like. We are very compatible. We think the same, and sometimes when I say something he says the same thing to me at the same time.’
The planets were certainly smiling upon Nigora the day Bannatyne booked into the Harley Street dentist to have his crowns fixed in May. As luck would have it, a wealthy and much older Russian politician (she refuses to say who) she’d been dating for more than a year had recently cancelled their wedding plans.
‘He was a senator so he was a very influential person back in Russia,’ she says of her former beau, 14 years her senior. ‘He proposed to me on day one. We met in a private club in London. He came up to me and said: “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for 20 years. Be my wife.”
‘I said: “Are you mad? Please leave me alone. I’m here with my friends.” In the end he was very, very persistent. I really like that quality, and that’s what I like about Duncan.
‘But I now realise with Russian men they take care of you financially, but once they have you it’s almost like being in prison.
‘My ex would not let me work or go out on my own. He would not let me travel anywhere with my friends. We had a wedding date, but I said to him: “Look we have to have some time out.” If he was like that before marriage I didn’t know what he would be like afterwards.
‘He said: “In that case, if you want time out, we’re going to finish.”
‘I said: “Let’s finish then.” I was very fiery. He was very fiery and we kind of ended up cooling things down. We still spoke after a while.
‘Because of the situation with my ex, though we broke up he was still very much looking after Gabrielle because they had a great relationship. He put her into one of the best private schools, Queen Anne’s School in Berkshire.’
Hang on Nigora. Rewind. The Russian is paying for your daughter to attend a private girls’ school, whose fees are £10,350 a term? I ask if she gets upset at suggestions that she is a gold-digger. The grin slips.
‘I come from a very noble family background,’ she says. ‘One of the streets in Uzbekistan is named after my grandfather Hamid Suleymanov. My grandma and grandpa are like celebrities coming from a royal family. My father is a very famous guy. He’s a professor in archaeology.
‘I’ve got a sister in Canada who’s a pharmacist, a brother in London who’s a very top guy in recruitment and a younger sister who just left for New York to work as a surgical nurse, so we are all international.
‘It’s easy for people to make a judgment on how I look, but I do come from a very, very educated background, and I have had a good life before Duncan as well.’
Her ancestry is colourful enough to keep the Who Do You Think You Are? researchers busy for months.
There’s a great- grandfather, Khojaev Suleymanov, descended from royalty, who brought cinematography to Uzbekistan. ‘He married four times and my granddad was born from his last wife,’ says Nigora. ‘There was a 30-year age difference. She was the young, beautiful greatgrandma. In fact, I look a bit like her.’
The grandfather with the street named after him was accused of espionage against the Soviets and locked up in a prison camp. He was released following Stalin’s death in 1953 to write many books, become ‘very famous’ and raise his ‘very, very famous’ son, Rustam.
Nigora was 20 and studying chemistry in Uzbekistan when she met her future husband, a car salesman from Dunstable. ‘He was from a very good family and madly in love with me,’ she says. ‘He proposed after three weeks. He was my first boyfriend. It felt right.’
Was he older, too? ‘Nine years,’ she says. ‘But I felt really happy.’
Nigora was 21 and newly married when she arrived in England. Their daughter was born in 2002, but soon the marriage began to flounder.
‘My husband was working every single day for his family at their garage,’ she says. ‘I am very ambitious, but I felt like a nobody here.’
When Gabby was three, Nigora enrolled on a spa and business management course. ‘My husband became possessive. He wouldn’t let me go out with my friends. I realised I needed a break.
‘I was going to pick up Gabrielle and go home to Uzbekistan. I said: “If we’re going through a divorce I want to go home and stay with my family.” He said I could stay in the house and he would see Gabrielle.
‘My mother stayed with me for six months while I was working. I got divorced in 2007 and met Duncan 15 weeks ago so, yes, a lot of things have happened in my life.’
Which takes us to that morning in May. Nigora had recently started work as a treatment co-ordinator at the chi-chi Harley Street practice.
‘They were training me and asked if I could cover reception. In the morning we have a meeting about patients and I heard: “Today we have Duncan Bannatyne.” When he arrived I looked at him and thought: “OK, it’s Duncan Bannatyne.” ‘ There was another patient asking where I was from. I was telling him my story and Duncan sat there listening. When he came back down from his appointment I wasn’t there, so we missed each other.’
Thankfully, though, fate intervened two weeks later.
‘I was walking to the post office to drop off some lab work and — it’s so funny, I do believe in fate — I looked to my left and could see some gorgeous man walking towards me like James Bond. He had this amazing dark suit. I thought: “Oh my God, that’s Duncan.”
‘I don’t think he recognised me. Duncan has this condition where he forgets faces. [She means prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which Bannatyne has spoken about.]
‘So I took a chance and said: “Hi, how’s your tooth?” When I asked him that, he realised who I was. He said: ‘Oh, I really want to hear more of your story. By the way, I’m madly in love with you. Can I have your number?’
‘I was really shocked, but he asked me out and I agreed.’
They met for a drink at The Ivy Club and clicked straight away.
‘He told me he was in a relationship, but that it was coming to an end. We were kind of seeing each other on a friendly basis.’
Then, they were photographed leaving Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair. ‘Our relationship began when all of this silly publicity came out,’ she says. ‘He wanted to take me to Paris and asked me: “Are we going to be boyfriend and girlfriend?” I just sort of smiled.’
Did she . . . er . . . notice the age difference? ‘I’ve been with a younger
‘I’m madly in love with you,’ he said on their second meeting ‘A pre-nup? We don’t discuss it,’ she snaps
man and, you know what, Duncan is far too energetic, far too exciting, far too young spiritually and physically compared to someone who is 35.’
In fact, the speed with which this relationship has evolved since that weekend in Paris would put a pair of love- sick teenagers to shame.
They moved in together upon their return and appeared on ITV’s This Morning to hint at plans for marriage. Last month, they invited OK Magazine to his Portuguese villa for a gushing interview with Nigora’s daughter, during which the father- of- six revealed he’s hoping to have a seventh child.
And they’re travelling the world to raise money for Operation Smile, which funds surgery for children with facial deformities.
‘ Whether we’re just walking around or doing parachute jumps for charity, every single moment with Duncan is special,’ says Nigora.
‘I’ve met all his children and I absolutely love and adore them. They are very supportive over everything — if we want to have more children, if we want to get married.
‘We’ve spoken about marriage and the future, but he hasn’t asked me yet.’ She grins fit to burst.
Have these chats included discussions about a pre-nup? Following his costly divorce from second wife Joanne McCue three years ago, Bannatyne vowed not to marry again without one.
For the first time, Nigora’s voice hardens.
‘I don’t want to talk about this. We don’t really discuss things like that,’ she snaps. ‘I need to be a bit more resilient and ignore those losers who have nothing better to do than sit there commenting about me.
‘They should probably do more charity work and help people.’
Perhaps if the planets were fortuitously aligned, they might.