When he seized the reins as leader of Ukip in September last year, Henry Bolton must have seemed like a dream come true to the party faithful.
Ex-soldier, ex-policeman, OBE, husband, father-of-three and all-round good egg, the 54-year-old seemed like the perfect candidate to take the party forward after an undeniably troublesome year.
But, oh, what a difference a few months can make in British politics.
Henry Boton, pictured here with his 25-year-old lover Jo Marney, appeared to be the perfect new leader for Ukip when he was elected by the party in September last year
The Ukip leader is currently married to Tatiana Smurova-Bolton, 41, with whom he has had two daughters, including Victoria Yekaterina, who was born on a train heading to London
This week, amid revelations of Bolton’s burgeoning relationship with a 25-year-old bottle blonde who refers to herself as the ‘Bad Girl of Brexit’, even his closest allies were left shaking their heads in despair at the prospect of yet another scandal rocking the party.
I say ‘relationship’, because Bolton says that what he has been doing with Jo Marney — who describes herself with varying degrees of accuracy as ‘presenter, music journalist, model, actor and Brexiteer’ — is not an affair.
He insists there is ‘nothing clandestine’ about his romance with Miss Marney, and sources close to Mr Bolton have insisted the relationship did not begin until after his split from his wife, Tatiana Smurova-Bolton, 42.
‘My wife is fully aware of what’s been going on and has been abroad since July,’ he said.
Not so, says Tatiana. ‘All I can say at the moment is that the reports that have emerged are inaccurate. My focus right now is on my children, and at the moment I will not be commenting further, ’ she told the Mail yesterday. Those close to Tatiana are outraged on her behalf.
Mr Bolton married his first wife Karin Dohn who is from Denmark, in the early 1980s
Even Bolton’s own mother, 79-year-old Sheila, has said she is appalled at her son’s behaviour. His three siblings, she added, are also ‘devastated’.
Their despair is perhaps not surprising, for, as the Mail can reveal today, Bolton has been married not twice, as has previously been claimed, but THREE times.
First, there was his Danish ex-wife, Karin Dohn. Bolton met her while serving in the Army in Germany. Their daughter, Hazel-Louisa, was born in Denmark in 1985. She is now 32 — seven years older than Bolton’s new girlfriend.
We can also reveal that Bolton married another Russian, hairdresser Lidia Gouniakova, ten years his junior, in 2002.
He met his current wife, secretary Tatiana Smurova, a few years later when they were both working at The Organisation For Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna. They married in Westminster in August 2011.
Their first daughter, Lucinda, was born in 2013. The arrival of their second, Victoria, in May 2016, made the news when Tatiana gave birth on a train not long after it had arrived at St Pancras station. Her husband was said to have cut the umbilical cord as she lay in the carriage.
Unlike this week’s media storm, that heart-warming tale must have seemed a PR dream for Bolton and his Ukip team, adding to his image as unflappable and strong, a man who can stay calm in a crisis.
It certainly stood him in good stead when he put himself forward as a Ukip leadership candidate.
At the time of the leadership elections in September, Bolton made absolutely no mention of his marriage being in trouble.
He even spoke fondly of Tatiana during a radio interview in late October when he discussed the possibility of selling his home to finance his unpaid role as Ukip leader.
Asked how his wife might feel about the loss of their home — a seafront apartment in Folkestone — he said she was ‘nervous and supportive’, a strange comment to make if the marriage was in difficulty.
Yesterday, a Ukip spokesman said Mr Bolton had visited his wife in Austria before Christmas, but returned to the UK on December 24. He then went for a drink with Miss Marney on Boxing Day.
So who is Miss Marney, a woman with a penchant for posting semi-nude snaps of herself online, whose racy image doesn’t fit the mould of archetypal’s politician’s partner?
Bolton is now in a relationship with model Jo Marney, 25, from Kent, having dumped his wife
First and foremost, she is an avid Ukip supporter. It is unclear when exactly she first met the rather staid and unremarkable-looking Bolton, but on December 16 she posted a photograph of the politician with his arm around her. The caption read: ‘Fantastic Xmas dinner with our leader Henry Bolton.’
While Bolton has been less than eager to speak about the relationship, outspoken Miss Marney declared: ‘He was in an unhappy marriage and was estranged from his wife. He started dating me and we found we made each other happy.’
So what does Ukip’s high command make of Bolton’s insistence that his romantic high jinks ‘in no way distract me or our party from the vital mission we have ahead’?
Not much, it would seem. As one Ukip source told me: ‘The members are quietly wringing their hands at what’s going on. There is the feeling it is yet another symptom of the party being in slow meltdown.’
According to those who know Miss Marney well, she is unlikely to care a fig what Ukip members — or anyone else — may think of her.
One of her former flames, 51-year-old rocker Nigel Mogg, described her to the Mail this week as an ‘opportunist obsessed with being around famous people’.
Educated at the £18,000-a-year Rochester Independent College and Canterbury Christ Church University, Miss Marney claims to have a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in multimedia and lives with her mother and stepfather, who ran two construction companies, in a £500,000 detached house in Maidstone, Kent.
Even the most perfunctory glance at her social media reveals a woman who is not shy of the camera.
Ukip confirmed Mr Bolton visited his wife on Christmas Eve in Austria before flying back to Kent to meet Ms Marney, pictured left, outside her home in Maidstone
Aside from the scantily-clad photos she has frequently posted online, many of which were removed this week, there were shots of her posing with celebrities including singer Tom Jones and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
She is understood to have been in a relationship with Gilmour’s cousin, after contacting him through Facebook in March 2016, until they broke up last summer.
In September, she bragged on Facebook of her links to the Gilmour family: ‘I know all the kids well and my ex is a Gilmour. I come from a world of famous people.’
She stuck a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn in place of a fairy at the top of her Christmas tree this year — and regularly shares her outspoken views via social media.
She took a swipe at victims of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, describing those who complained they had been raped and sexually assaulted as ‘hard done by little rich girls’ and ‘white Hollywood chicks who shagged some fat old man for a part in a movie’.
She has also described Grenfell Tower, where 71 people died in a fire in June, as ‘a nest of illegal immigrants of all varieties’, writing: ‘That’s why they can’t identify most of them.’
And despite her claims to have worked for U.S.-based publication Altarboy Music from April 2012 to the present day, an executive there told the Mail she had never been more than an intern for a few days.
‘She has never been a writer for us,’ he said.
Miss Marney does, however, appear to have devoted much of her time to the music world.
Nigel Mogg, lead singer for LA-based band The Brutalists, told the Mail this week that Marney contacted him out of the blue when she was 17 and was texting him within a day. He said their relationship became sexual when he came to the UK on tour: ‘I made her show me her ID to make sure I couldn’t get into trouble.’
He added: ‘She was always asking me for the phone numbers of famous people in some pretty big bands that I know.’ However, Miss Marney denied this yesterday.
‘She was way too volatile,’ Mogg said. ‘She upset so many of my friends that I was apologising for her the whole time.’
Mark Thorn, 46-year-old lead singer of band Neon Animals, said Miss Marney sent him unsolicited friend requests on Facebook.
‘She sent me flirty messages saying: “You’re hot”, and a picture of herself in her underwear. I replied that I had a girlfriend but that did not seem to bother her.’
A Ukip spokesman told the Mail yesterday that Miss Marney has no recollection of Mr Thorn. However, another former associate in the music industry told the Mail: ‘I feel bad for this Ukip dude as this chick is nuts.’
None of this bodes well for Henry Bolton, who was wearing his slippers when he came to the door of Miss Marney’s home this week.
Speaking about his new relationship, he said: ‘Whilst I fully accept that as a national political figure I can expect to be the subject of media attention, I also believe that we’re all entitled to a certain degree of privacy.’
Born in Kenya and raised in Thatcham, Berks, Bolton’s professional image was scandal-free until Jo Marney crossed his path.
After leaving school, he attended the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst and passed out as best overall cadet.
As a soldier with the Royal Hussars, he has served in Germany, Belize, Cyprus and Bosnia. He later spent nine years as a Thames Valley Police officer and was commended for bravery.
But it was for his work as a leading international security expert that Bolton earned his OBE.
He received particular praise for his work for the British Government in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012, helping the country re-group and work against the Taliban.
Speaking to her local paper, the Newbury Weekly News, not long before her son received his OBE in 2013, his mother, Sheila, said: ‘He has done things no one else in their right mind would have done. We are very proud of him.’
Bolton was a former soldier, former policeman, an OBE as well as a married family man
Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage was equally full of praise for Bolton following his shock victory in last year’s Ukip leadership election.
‘He’s a guy of achievement and a man of substance’, adding that he was a ‘solid, sensible, decent, non-extreme human being’.
But that was before this week’s revelations about Miss Marney.
The Ukip source who spoke to the Mail this week said: ‘It’s pretty foolish saying they deserve a private life while dating a Brexit campaigner who has posted pictures of them all over social media.’
Bolton is said to have been in the process of introducing his new girlfriend to Ukip party donors when news of their relationship broke. Goodness knows what they make of their new leader’s antics.
The revelations come as the party is in dire financial straits and membership levels are falling.
‘Lack of money in the party is a major problem,’ said the Ukip source. ‘He has to get their approval. Everything has gone horribly wrong. The way things are going, there’s a significant risk of the party ceasing to exist in a year or two.’
Indeed, if Henry Bolton was once seen as the ‘safe pair of hands’ who would turn around Ukip’s fortunes, then those who elected him could be forgiven for wondering if they made the right choice.