In “you go, girl” news of the week, Holly Valance is getting up close and personal with her former bodyguard. In doing so she is fulfilling every girlish fantasy since Whitney Houston first warbled “I will always love you-ooh-ooo” while clad in a robo sex-pharoah outfit and being carried off by Kevin Costner. How do I know this? Because, as the story broke, a long-married friend informed me: “I’m not saying I’d give it all up to be a divorcee making the beast with two backs with her bodyguard — only I am.”
Should your reaction to this be “Who?” and “What relevance does this have to the zeitgeist?”, stay with me here. Valance, 42, is the former Neighbours star and Aussie popstrel turned right-wing activist who split from the gazillionaire property developer Nick Candy last year after 13 years of wedlock. Last week brought news that Candy, 53, had sold the pair’s former home in Chelsea, southwest London, for £265 million in what is Britain’s — and possibly the world’s — most staggeringly spenny property deal. Now we learn that the artist formerly known as Mrs Candy may have moved on with 34-year-old Grant Gale, the chap who used to protect her in the very same ritzy gaff.
Some may find the emergence of images of the pair tenderly embracing something of a coincidence: a soft hardman launch, as it were. Could this be a visual conveying of the sentiment “You get the swag, I get the shag, mate”? There are thrilling lashings of the dynamic that made 2018’s Bodyguard, with Keeley Hawes as Richard Madden’s “principal”, one of the most sighed-over dramas of all time, while students of popular culture will have the lyrics to Valance’s hit Kiss Kiss, where our heroine expressed a desire to be “somewhere close to heaven with Neanderthal man”, earworming in their brains.
The front page of The Sun on April 19
In Neanderthalling out, Valance may be the latest in a long line of women said to have succumbed to sleeping with the help — specifically the muscle-bound, hot-as-Hades variety whose job it is to make you his sole focus. Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lopez, Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian and Heidi Klum have reportedly enjoyed flings with a member of their security squad. Princess Diana was believed to have held a torch for her protection officer, while Princess Stéphanie of Monaco married her minder.
For this is a tale as old as time. It’s Guinevere and Lancelot in Arthurian romance, it’s István and Helen in David Szalay’s 2025 Booker-winner Flesh. The Lancelot/István/Grant figure is fit, pliant and subservient. The wealthy husband may be older (Karl in Flesh), have the weight of the world on his shoulders (King Arthur) or have gone a bit Reformy (Candy). And what better riposte to Candy’s obsession with London being unsafe than to bring one’s security in close?
Not everyone can bag such a butch beau. However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a newly minted divorcee in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a gardener, personal trainer or tennis coach.
Valance with Nick Candy in 2019Karwai Tang/WireImage
As a friend who is separating after the best — read worst — part of three decades tells me. “I am owed.” (Understand lunatic emphasis here.) Even a pal who has been hitched a mere 16 years recounts that her level of what the therapist Terry Real terms “normal marital hatred” is off the scale. “Would I jump at the chance to sleep with a willing employee? Yes, I would. Lady Chatterley vibes a go go.”
Obviously I myself have no need of domestic revenge fantasies, exquisitely happy with my 11-year relationship. I am also a feminist who refuses to have truck with antiquated gender stereotypes. I can only tell you that this scenario is what a colleague refers to using the technical term “ultimate bloody swoon”. And, at a time when the apocalypse feels a daily reality, Valance is to be applauded for living the (unreconstructed) dream. Does Holly have a Whitney soundtrack in her head whenever Grant is fulfilling his duties? For legal reasons I am obliged to state that we cannot say.