DAMIAN ASPINALL, tall and skinny, bounds up to say hello. “I’m Damian,” he says poshly with the broadest of grins. “Sorry, we were just having a look at the zoo.”
I had got to the front of his Howletts mansion while he was still beetling round the corner in his golf buggy. He leads the way in, past the toddler carrier parked by the grand front door, through the old library, to a large sitting room where tea is waiting in a silver service.
Aspinall, 45, dressed in drainpipe chinos and a crew-neck jumper, sprawls his lanky limbs in an armchair and pushes back his long hair. With his high cheekbones, wide mouth and far-apart eyes, he has striking good looks that are — I hesitate to say this of anyone who runs a zoo — faintly simian.
“I’ve not done many of these,” he says with a nod at my tape recorder.
He gets enough coverage anyway, just being the son of renowned club-owner and conservationist John Aspinall, who set up Britain’s first casino. Damian’s father ran with a fast set — Sir James Goldsmith, Lord Lucan — but also devoted his life to establishing two private zoos at separate stately homes, Howletts and Port Lympne in Kent.
Aspinall senior died six years ago, and Damian, his eldest son — there is an elder sister, half-brother and two step-brothers, too — now holds the reins at both the casino operation and the zoos’ charitable foundation that bears the family name.
And it is Aspinall junior who has been popping up recently as winner of a brace of competitions in cities desperate to build Britain’s first super-casino. He is also squiring Donna Air, television presenter and tabloid regular. The couple have a two-year-old daughter, Freya.
So it’s pretty hard to miss him, especially as his new casino vehicle, set up as a joint venture with James Packer, son of the late Kerry Packer, has become one of the few British operations challenging the American giants seeking to build big casinos here.
“I think we are the viable British alternative to Las Vegas glitz,” he says. “Where the decision makers want an outward-looking entertainment complex, with shops, boulevards and bars, not everything going on inside a box, we are the ones.”
Cardiff and Middlesbrough have both selected Aspinall/Packer for their super-casino projects, if they get the nod from government. With increased speculation that Westminster is going to do a u-turn again on the number of big sites (“regional casinos”) it will allow — originally eight, then one, now predicted to go back to eight — Aspinall could find himself in pole position.
He and Packer are also launching a string of smaller clubs, called Aspers — his father’s nickname — across England. Aspinall claims that the first one, opened in Newcastle four months ago, is the most successful British casino launch ever, averaging 1,000 people a night with 25,000 memberships already sold.
That claim is disputed by larger rivals, who see Aspinall as an ambitious maverick with a deep-pocketed friend, but lacking experience. “You never see Damian much on the circuit,” says one boss. “We thought he was a playboy.”
Ouch. Aspinall brushes off the doubts. “I wasn’t doing casinos until my dad died,” he smiles. “But I knew the industry had growth prospects. It was about to deregulate and I gambled that I would be good at it and that it was in my genes.”
Then he shrugs good-naturedly. Aspinall’s hesitant charm is rather winning. He is keen to emphasise that he worked for his wealth. Everyone assumes he inherited his father’s estate, he says, but “90%-95%” went to the zoos’ charitable foundation. He made his own money, leaving school at 16 and working in property. Then, after his father’s death, he had to buy back the family casino interests — with Packer’s help. He sold the overseas operations and kept the London club Aspinalls. That he also heads the charitable foundation he bought them from makes it complicated, but par for the course.
For nothing is ever predictable with the Aspinall family, whose opaque finances — Damian estimates £200m went into the zoos — were always as intriguing as their social life. Some of that hasn’t changed.
“Oh ’ullo, very nice to meet you,” says Donna Air, in jeans and hippy top, bursting in from the library. Air, 26, blonde, beautiful and very Geordie, seems an incongruous chatelaine. She, in turn, finds her boyfriend’s unease with the media very funny.
“Maybe you should be talking to me about deregulation of gambling and slot machines?” she grins before bowing out, chased by Aspinall’s “Go away.”
Back to business. Aspinalls, his father’s eponymous club in London, is high-end. What experience does he have of the mass market? He grins. “I like the challenge.” And Packer’s family has experience by the ton in Australia.
The success of the smaller format Aspers, with its bars, restaurant, treatment areas, iPod lounge, shoeshine and more, shows he and Packer have the populist touch. “It’s different to provincial casinos. We want people to come and have a fun night out and not have to gamble.”
And Packer’s role? “He’s 39, I’m 45, we’ve been pals since I was 26. We came together because it was a nice thing to do.”
Split 50-50? “His resources are vast,” grins Aspinall. “But yes, 50-50.”
And they both share experience of a deeper kind, struggling to escape the shadow cast by a larger-than-life father. Aspinall’s own childhood was emotionally tough: his mother split from his father in a bitter divorce and he rarely saw her. “And we didn’t see Dad much either, so we were brought up with weird nannies.”
Aspinall also felt he disappointed his father. “He was very well-read and bright and I wasn’t.” Aspinall got one O-level — “a C in history” — before deciding he just wanted to get out and prove himself.
He worked in Canada and Australia, staying with the Packers. When he came back to Britain, he got a job as an estate agent. “My Dad didn’t give me anything. He wouldn’t even lend me £1,500 for a car.”
But in property he found his niche and soon set up his own company. By 25, he says, he had made £3m. “My Dad couldn’t believe it. I’d gone from runt to superstar.”
Since his twenties he has been a serial investor both here and in America, and seems to have done well. He lives in a converted church in Knightsbridge, has swish offices nearby in Sloane Street and has been married, divorced and is now living with Air.
He only gets in a twist when I ask him about his source of income. “It, er, filters through various, um, you won’t find it, it’s not simple.” Then he says Aspinall Holdings, soon to be renamed Aspers Group, is not UK-registered. Later his PR man tells me it is. What? “I don’t know why it’s complicated,” says Aspinall, suddenly stroppy. “I don’t want to get into my corporate structure.”
Then he beams and changes the subject. He is going to have to be more plausible and public, too, if he is going to convince others that Aspers Group is “the viable British alternative”. But he knows that, and he has already won over local authorities, so maybe you shouldn’t be betting against him.
And he has got a point to prove. The interview over, we join Air and Freya for a walk round the grave where his father is buried opposite Howletts’ front door. Then, looking solemn, he adds: “I’m going to be buried here too.”
Air instantly punctures the mood. “And my mausoleum,” she says, indicating a large structure with her hands, “is going here.”
She stands in a space that will neatly block the view from the house, and winks. Aspinall laughs. If anyone can help him escape his father’s shadow, it may be her.
DAMIAN ASPINALL’S WORKING DAY
THE Aspinall Holdings boss wakes at 7.30am at his home in Knightsbridge. “I have breakfast with Donna and Freya, then walk to work at 8.30,” says Damian Aspinall. “That’s my only exercise. I am horribly lazy.”
His office is round the corner in Sloane Street. “I like my office to be an extension of my home — lovely fireplace and sofas. I function better in a relaxed atmosphere.”
His day is filled with endless meetings — “management, design, landlords” — and he rarely eats lunch. He charters a helicopter to get round England to the various potential casino sites. He finishes by 6.30pm and goes home. Another daughter is at school next to his office. “I pass sweets through the fence at break-time,” he says.
If he is entertaining contacts he will take them to his club, Aspinalls, which is managed by his uncle.
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: May 24, 1960
Marital status: divorced, living with girlfriend, three children
School: Millfield
Salary package: £600,000
Home: Knightsbridge
Car: grey Range Rover
Favourite book: Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Favourite music: Coldplay
Favourite film: The Shawshank Redemption
Favourite gadget: Blackberry
Last holiday: Thailand
Interests: animals
DOWNTIME
“WHEN I’m not working I do this,” says Damian Aspinall, pointing at Howletts zoo. “This is all-consuming.”
His father established two zoos 20 miles apart in Kent, which effectively compete with each other. “He needed the land for breeding,” says Aspinall. “But they always lost money — 250 staff, 1,200 acres, millions of acres in the wild in Africa, it has to be a passion.”
Aspinall’s father had a particularly close relationship with his gorillas. In the past, Aspinall children have always been introduced to the gorillas as babies, handed through the bars of the cage and cradled by the females. Damian Aspinall has had to stop the tradition with his latest child, Freya.
“The press asked if I was going to put Freya in, but it caused such a fuss with social services and the like. We’re not going to do it any more.”
