DINING on bugs with a knife and fork and declaring she is “sport for the
oiks”, Lady Colin Campbell is already the breakout star of I’m A Celebrity.
Like a real-life Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey — but with a Jamaican
accent — her eccentricity and one-liners are entrancing viewers.
During her eating challenge on Monday night in which she was served turkey
testicles, the 66-year-old aristocrat inquired of Ant and Dec: “What are
b*****ks?”
And after finding out the nature of the trial, she told the hosts: “I wish I’d
have known it was definitely food as I’d have worn my pearls.”
Asked if she had ever been camping, she replied: “I’ve never done it before
and I can see how wise I was.”
Tonight the reality TV newcomer faces her scariest Bushtucker Trial since the
series began on ITV on Sunday: Being encased in a coffin — one of her
greatest fears.
But the socialite has already faced far sterner tests in real life.
She was born with a genital defect that meant despite being biologically
female she was registered as a boy and christened George William.
And although she thought of herself as a girl and wanted to act like one, her
wealthy parents Michael and Gloria Ziadie — part of one of Jamaica’s most
prominent families — insisted she conform as a boy.
By the age of 13, desperate to wear girls’ clothes and realising that she
fancied boys, the youngster secretly visited her mother’s gynaecologist to
ask for help.
But when her furious parents found out, they sent her to a barbaric
husband-and-wife medical team who forced her to have injections of male
hormones during a hellish three-week hospital stay.
The drugs made her voice drop, her nipples shrink and hair develop on her
upper lip.
When she refused to take any more, her father suggested she kill herself in
order to avoid shaming the family.
Lady Colin said: “He told me, ‘The one solution to your problem is a dose of
rat poison.’”
When she was 21 — and already working as a model in New York — she finally had
the surgery that would change her life. She was also able to legally change
her name to Georgia Arianna.
She said of the op: “No one ever faced the knife more eagerly than I.”
But despite the heartache her birth deformity has caused her, she insists it
was also the making of her.
She said: “If I hadn’t had the problems I did, I suspect that I might well
have ended up a poisonous, spoilt bitch.”
Just three years after the procedure she joined the aristocracy with her
marriage to Lord Colin Campbell, the younger brother of the 12th Duke of
Argyll, in 1974.
The pair had met only five days earlier.
They split up after only 14 months, with Lady Colin later accusing the art
dealer, now based in New York, of being a violent drug addict.
She said: “I could not have known Colin Campbell would turn out to be the
debased, cruel monster he turned out to be.”
Her hatred only deepened when, after the split, she claims the blue-blood sold
a story saying she was transsexual and that he had not known about her
physical history when they had married.
The socialite successfully sued over the allegation, saying: “It was awful.
It is offensive beyond belief. It was rape.
“When I realised that my husband had spread such lies for the money . . .
well, I never got over that and I never will.
“I said to Colin, ‘If you had any decency whatsoever, you would have stolen
that money rather than do what you have done. Not even a thief would have
had the gall to do this.’” Despite the emotional agony, she kept her
husband’s name and the title that went with it.
She later explained she did so in order to annoy Lord Colin’s elder brother,
the Duke of Argyll, who she suspected of plotting against her.
But she has also insisted: “It’s not as if I needed the title. I come from
a much more important family. He was the one who was lucky to be marrying
me.”
Following the end of her marriage, Lady Colin adopted two baby boys from
Russia, Dima and Misha, who are now in their 20s.
She also took a string of high- profile lovers, including former Conservative
minister Lord Henley and ex-EastEnders star Larry Lamb.
Lady C, as she is known in camp, once boasted: “There’s something about me,
even without make-up. Men always made a bee-line for me.”
Currently single, she says she is not looking for love on I’m A Celebrity.
She said: “My life is fulfilled and I have no ambitions in that direction
whatsoever. One would need to make space and it would have to be someone
pretty special for me to change it completely. I lack nothing in my life.”
Certainly, Lady Colin does not lack for controversy in her life.
Even with a background as colourful as hers, she has courted further attention
through her scandal-digging as an author of royal biographies.
Her 1992 bestseller Diana In Private: The Princess Nobody Knows revealed the
tragic royal’s battle with bulimia and intimate details of her affairs.
At the time the claims were dismissed as musings of a fantasist, only for many
to be later proved correct.
Then three years ago her biography of the Queen Mother claimed the royal’s
real mother was the family’s French cook.
And on her arrival in Australia ahead of filming the series, Lady Colin
claimed she still had more secrets to reveal, declaring: “Why should I hold
back?”
Lady Colin admits her unlikely move from high society to eating crocodile anus
for TV cameras in the rainforest is down to one reason: Cash.
After snapping up 18th Century Castle Goring in West Sussex for the knockdown
price of £700,000 18 months ago, she was hit with a £2million restoration
bill. The roof alone will cost £50,000 to fix.
Lady Colin, who currently lives in a more modest maisonette in Kennington,
London, admitted: “I am doing it for selfish reasons. It will help with the
roof at the castle.”
She added: “My eldest son actually didn’t want me to do it at first. He
thought I was too civilised to do something like this. But once I had made
the decision I was going to do it, he was, of course, very supportive.”
Despite her poshness, Lady Colin has never been one to hold back,
previously damning Cherie Blair as “charmless” and Princess Diana’s brother
Earl Spencer as a “swine.”
This straight-forwardness was evident in Oz even before filming began.
Lady Colin got stuck into fellow guests at the posh Versace Hotel, where
contestants stay before the show, for failing to dress up for dinner. She
fumed: “I’ve never stayed in a place like this before. They don’t dress for
dinner . . . locals here sit down for dinner in shorts, short-sleeved
shirts, T-shirts and flip-flops. I can’t believe it.”
But table manners aside, she believes she is no snob and accepts her position
in a world where reality TV stars are the new aristocracy.
She explained: “We might look at the people who are being written about now
and say ‘What have they accomplished?’, but 20 or 30 years ago people were
being written about and they hadn’t accomplished anything either, except
being born into the right background.
“I do think things are changing for the better.”
She also thinks her old-school background will help in the jungle, saying: “I
was brought up in Jamaica when people had to occupy themselves and entertain
each other.
“And so I would imagine we are there to entertain each other and the public.”
That is certainly working so far, with show insiders predicting viewers are
finding her so entertaining they are likely to vote for her to do most of
the Bushtucker Trials with the infamous creepy-crawlies.
But that part of her jungle stay has never fazed Lady Colin.
She declared: “Having had so many human rats in my life, I don’t think I’m
scared of the animal variety.”