Whose side will Strictly’s Emma take as brother splits from wife?

WHEN Emma McQuiston married Viscount Weymouth in 2013, she became chatelaine of the fabulous Longleat House — and also emulated the path taken by her much older brother, Iain, who married into the same aristocratic family more than two decades earlier. But part of the fairy tale has now unravelled.

For I can disclose that Iain, 58, and his wife, Lady Silvy Thynne, 61, younger half- sister of Emma’s late father-in-law, Alexander, Marquess of Bath, are now living apart. ‘This isn’t as either of them would wish it to be,’ a family friend tells me.

Silvy remains at the family home in Wiltshire and there are hopes for a reconciliation. ‘She’s a very sweet person and is very, very unhappy about it all. Iain’s struggling.’

When the couple, who have an adult son, Milo, and daughter, Eve, married in 1989, they brought together two extended and unconventional families.

On Iain’s side, one of the bridesmaids was his half- sister Emma, then just four years old, born to Iain’s mother, Suzanna, during the latter’s passionate if short-lived affair with Nigerian oil tycoon Ladi Jadesimi. But the McQuiston family tree was child’s play by comparison to Silvy’s.

Her mother, Virginia, had two much older daughters by a first marriage to David Tennant, son of the 1st Lord Glenconner.

Her father, Henry, 6th Marquess of Bath, who shocked the aristocracy by establishing the safari park, also had children by a previous marriage — one daughter and four sons, of whom the eldest surviving one was Alexander.

He was already notorious at the time of Silvy’s 1989 wedding: for his open marriage to Hungarian model Anna Gael, for the erotic murals he’d painted at Longleat, and his numerous ‘wifelets’ — as he referred to girlfriends, some of whom lived in cottages on the estate.

He was accompanied to Silvy’s wedding by his only son, Ceawlin, then 15, who, though neither could have known it, was to marry bridesmaid Emma 24 years later.

Since then, Emma has starred in Strictly, given birth to John, now five, and Henry, who is now three, and last month, on her father-in-law’s death, became the Marchioness of Bath.

So, despite the sadness now engulfing her brother, the McQuiston and Thynne dynasties remain entwined.

Iain declines to comment and Lady Silvy was unavailable.