Donna Air on her very private romance with James Middleton: 'I’m very happy'

When Meghan Markle comes to choosing her besties within the Royal family circle, it is an odds-on bet that she will be looking no further than our own Donna Air. Donna – who has been in a relationship with Kate Middleton’s younger brother James for the past four years – belongs to the same breed of woman (dubbed the ‘glitter bloods’) at the heart of the new British aristocracy.

Confident, beautiful, self-made from humble roots but with that dazzle that comes from the world of show business (hence they are the glitter within a blue-blood world), Donna, like Meghan, is as at ease in Kensington Palace as she is in the dressing room of her latest TV show, Dancing on Ice, which is hosted by Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby and begins this weekend.

‘I am really enjoying the training,’ says Donna, who has yet to face the show’s hard-to-please judges – choreographer Jason Gardiner, and the Olympic champion skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.

‘I started off terrified – especially when I had to sign the insurance form – but now I’m loving it. Every fibre in my brain is just concentrating on staying upright. I don’t think about anything else, which is incredibly liberating.’

There is, however, a troubling issue with Donna, in terms of what exactly is going on between her and James Middleton. Both regulars on the cocktails-and-canapés circuit, they met in 2013, but, despite his declarations of ‘I love Donna very much’, there have been – according to the press – several break-ups. And as we sit down to talk in the cosy bar of a west London member’s club, it’s not entirely clear if they have drifted apart since she accompanied him to Pippa’s wedding to James Matthews last May.

‘Well,’ she says with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I never talk about my relationship, but what I will say is it has never been on-off. And I’m very happy.’ We’ll take that as confirmation, then. So, given that she remains part of the royal circle, what does she think of Prince Harry’s intended?

‘Meghan was at Pippa’s wedding and seems very nice,’ she says. ‘And, like the rest of the nation, we all love a royal wedding.’ Like Meghan, Donna has risen to the top entirely under her own steam, beginning her career at the age of 10 when she starred in the kid’s TV show Byker Grove alongside her friends Ant and Dec.

It is a point the Newcastle-born 38-year-old wants to make. Her entrée into high society began in San Lorenzo in 2000 when, at a dinner with the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, she was introduced to Tara’s mate – John Damian Androcles Aspinall – the Croesus-rich conservationist with an aristocratic lineage dating back generations. They instantly began a relationship that lasted six and a half years and produced a daughter, Freya, who is now 14 years old.

My priority is being the mother of a teenage girl. It’s a question of putting the brakes on

‘From the moment I met Freya’s father,’ says Donna, ‘my whole position in life was suddenly down to being with him. To some people, I was presented as this Eliza Doolittle figure, this working-class Geordie girl who had come from nothing and suddenly had everything. The whole thing was completely untrue and actually very sexist.’

The real Donna Air is a far greater sum of parts than a girl who has been in relationships with high-society men. In person, she is smart, funny and easy to talk to. She laughs about rumours of her having had elocution lessons to erase her Geordie roots.

‘I admit my voice changes, but then I’ve lived in London more than half my life – the Geordie is still very much there and when I go home I come back with a much stronger accent.’ She remains fiercely protective of her old mates Ant (McPartlin) and Dec (Donnelly), and is full of support for Ant after he recently admitted becoming addicted to painkillers.

‘I completely admire the way he handled it. I still refer to them as “the boys”, even though we’re all much older now. We are just part of each other’s lives.’

Donna – whose father, Trevor, was a mechanical engineer for the local bus company, and whose mother, Marie, worked as a BT receptionist – got a part in Byker Grove, as feisty wannabe dancer Charlie Charlton, after scouts came to her local drama club.

‘Getting that part is the thing that really changed my life,’ she says. ‘I absolutely loved it. It did change things at school [she went to an all-girls convent and had tutoring alongside the other actors when on set] because you were this kid in a TV show and I learnt to build up a fa?ade to protect myself. But I was part of a gang with other actors on the show.’

At home, her parents watched – alongside her younger sister Francesca, who was just a year old – as the show, and Donna’s career, took off.  As Ant and Dec launched a pop career as PJ & Duncan, Donna and fellow Byker Grove co-star Jayni Hoy were asked to form a pop duo called Crush. At 15, a management team booked a tour of America, Japan and Asia for Crush, which meant that Donna would have to leave home indefinitely after completing her GCSEs.

She was 16 when she started touring. ‘My mum was completely devastated,’ she recalls. ‘My daughter is now that exact same age and I finally now know how she must have felt. But I wanted to do it. Nothing and no one was stopping me.’

For the next two years, Donna travelled the world, a willowy blonde teenager with legs up to her armpits and huge green eyes. In the light of the recent unfolding events about young women in the celebrity stratosphere being abused by predatory men, she admits to rethinking those years.

‘I actually can’t believe I came away unscathed,’ she says. ‘Our management looked out for us but there were obviously lots of incidents with dodgy guys. Lots of times I’d be in a motel room with the door locked, all my valuables stuffed into a pillowcase and not closing my eyes to sleep for a second. But nothing bad actually happened.

'My brain always worked on overtime and my thing was never to get into a situation where there is no way out. It does make me realise how hard it must’ve been for my mum to have such an independent daughter. I have to remember I was always OK.’

But of course she realises being streetwise only protected her so far. The rest was luck. Back in London, aged 18, she got a job as an MTV presenter, followed later by stints over the following six years as a presenter on TFI Friday, as well as The Big Breakfast. And so began the glory years as one of the queens of the lad mag and Primrose Hill set. Does she regret posing in her undies?

‘Never,’ she says. ‘It was a period of time that will never happen again. I was probably very immature, but I had a blast. And you should never regret that.’ Her memories of those days are hanging out at Supernova Heights, the party central residence of Noel Gallagher and Meg Mathews.

‘What I distinctly remember is being at their house and waiting for that doorbell to ring. One minute it would be Kate Moss, the next someone totally unexpected like Jerry Springer or Mel B. I’d take my dad to a party at Supernova Heights and he’d be so excited because he’s madly into music and had a secret fantasy of drumming with Oasis.

'We’d have days just sitting in Meg’s closet as she had the coolest clothes in London. My sister [Francesca, who now works as a buyer for Liam Gallagher’s Pretty Green clothing company] and I would try them all on. The All Saints girls would turn up on my doorstep and I’d walk straight from a party into work at MTV to do a live show. Noel would ring  up and pretend to be a punter asking me questions live on air. It was a wild and completely exhilarating time, and I feel very lucky to have been part of it. I’m still  in touch with pretty much everyone.’

Donna is no fool. She bought her own house in Primrose Hill at the age of 18 and  a second one within a matter of years,  which puts her comfortably in the multi-millionaire bracket.

‘My parents were always proud of owning their own house.  I was doing three live television shows a week, earning good money and living a great life, but I am my parents’ daughter.  I put my money into property.’

She now owns three London houses, which provides her with a home as well as a rental income. Her meeting with Aspinall came as a direct result of her job. ‘I interviewed Tara for The Big Breakfast. She wanted to meet up for dinner afterwards and we arranged to go to San Lorenzo. Damian just happened to be there at the same time. I had no clue who he was. He was just a friend of Tara’s.’

We talk about Tara, who died last February from a perforated ulcer at the age of 45. Donna looks down. ‘She had a wonderful spirit, but the greatest thing about Tara was that she was kind. Kindness is rare  in this world, but it was her very core.’

Along with Byker Grove, that meeting with Damian Aspinall was to prove life-changing for Donna. Aspinall’s father, John, loved animals (he owned a zoo) and gambling,  and his Mayfair club, The Clermont, was a regular home to Lord Lucan.

Again, Donna points out that there was no big moment where she, the poor Geordie lass, was swept into a whole new world of money. ‘I was independent, I was working and it wasn’t until my third or fourth date with Damian that I actually realised that side of him. He was living in a cottage [within the grounds of the ancestral home, Howletts in Kent, which he took over – along with his father’s zoo-bred gorillas – in 2000], I was living in London.’

At 24 – three years after meeting Aspinall – she became pregnant with Freya, and today she has nothing but positive words to say about her daughter’s father. It has been said the relationship ended because he wouldn’t commit to marriage.

‘I felt we were married,’ she says. ‘What I had with him was absolute security and the full knowledge that, for both of us, Freya is our top priority.’

In 2016 he married former Burberry employee Victoria Fisher. They all remain on friendly terms and Aspinall is involved in every aspect of his daughter’s life, from her choice of boarding school to her pocket money and holidays. His two daughters from his first marriage to Louise Sebag- Montefiore – Tansy, 28, and 25-year old Clary – are regular visitors to Donna’s home. ‘They are Freya’s sisters and they are family.’

As to whether she will have more children or even a marriage, she shrugs. ‘Maybe,’  she says. ‘I’ve never really been driven by marriage – but I am open to it. My priority is being the mother of a teenage girl. I’m at the stage my mother was with me, when I was 14, where it’s all about wanting independence and it’s terrifying. Freya would like to model. She also wants to be a conservationist, like her dad. I don’t object to either. It’s just a question of trying to put the brakes on.’

At 38, Donna remains a financially independent woman. She is a contributing style editor for Hello! magazine and an independent style consultant for the likes of the Hemsley sisters and actress Sienna Guillory. Along with her charity work, she is also in the company behind a new ‘sociable network’ app, Wistla.

‘It’s an online product aimed at getting people offline and enjoying real-life experiences around them,’ she says. But back to Dancing on Ice. Like Meghan, who has vowed not to give up her television career, Donna likes to keep a toe in show business.

‘Every two years, I have this urge to get back to that sparkle of television. I’ve been offered every reality show from Strictly Come Dancing to I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, but I only say yes when I feel it’s  the right time. I did Celebrity MasterChef because I love to cook, and with Dancing on Ice, I wanted to see if I could learn to skate.’

As to whether there will be an on-screen visit from James Middleton to cheer her on from the side of the rink, she flashes a full-on glitter-blood smile. ‘Now, that depends how far I get in the competition, doesn’t it?’ This is a woman who has it all sussed. Meghan, are you taking note?

‘Dancing on Ice’ starts on ITV tonight at 6pm