Penny Lancaster on Gregg Wallace facing “justice” – and why husband Rod Stewart will never retire

As well as three other luxury homes (in LA, Florida and France) the couple have a floating abode. Bluebell – a bright blue narrow boat – was Stewart’s 50th birthday gift to Lancaster, now 54, after she became captivated by canal boating during their daily lockdown river walks. “We’d see these beautiful narrow boats,” she explains, “and I thought, ‘That’s a slow life, isn’t it?’. They go five miles an hour and it’s all among nature. I told my mum that I’d love one. So she was like, ‘Hint hint, Rod’.”

A sanctuary for when “life gets fast”, Bluebell is a cause for near disaster, too. “We’ve got a bedroom at the front, and one time Rod was lying in there with the doors open while I was at the other end. Then I went, ‘Oh darling, hang on!’. We crashed into the bank, and a willow tree came into the bedroom,” recalls Lancaster. “Rod was lying there with a tree on top of him!”

The couple started dating in 1999 and married eight years later in Portofino, Italy. Eighteen years on, they still relish surprises. “We had a doorway that was blocked, and I put a bookcase in it,” says Lancaster. “Then it was a case of, ‘Find what I’ve done!’ Or he’ll say to me, ‘Go in there’ – and there’ll be a new painting or a new statue in the room.”

Balancing all that extravagance, glamour and wealth is service to the community. Most Thursdays, the former Strictly Come Dancing contestant does a night shift for the City of London Police. She became a volunteer Special Constable in 2021 after falling in love with policing in 2019 when she took part in the Channel 4 series Famous and Fighting Crime, and has been on duty at high-profile national events, including the funeral of Elizabeth II and the coronation of King Charles. She has also made two arrests that she describes as nerve-racking but quite momentous. “It’s like passing an exam,” she explains.

In her new memoir Someone Like Me, Lancaster writes that “it’s not until you’re catapulted from your safe place that you understand more of who you are”. Policing, she confirms, has strengthened her, not least by helping her process two episodes of sexual violence in earlier life. She was 17 when a fashion designer drugged her drink (she believes) and she woke beneath him midway through an assault. Five years earlier, a stranger molested her in an underpass on her way to school. Neither perpetrator was ever apprehended.

“That’s one of the reasons I feel I’m out there [as a special constable] now. I’m finding justice, but for someone else, someone like me – hence the title of the book.”

When his wife is policing, Stewart’s only “rules” are an end-of-shift text to confirm she is safely back at the nick, then a car home – never the last train. But Lancaster has a confession. “When he’s away, I do get the train home,” she smiles mischievously.

Stewart claimed Lancaster experienced bullying at the hands of Gregg Wallace, labelling him a “tubby, bald-headed, ill-mannered bully” who “humiliated” her when she took part in Celebrity MasterChef in 2021. Lancaster later contributed to an inquiry that upheld 45 out of 83 allegations of misconduct against Wallace and prompted his sacking from the BBC cookery show. “That was a refreshing piece of justice,” says Lancaster.

She’s talking from a sunlounger at the couple’s home in Palm Beach, while Sir Rod has half an hour of beach time before departing for a performance in North Carolina. But in a few days, Lancaster will be on the move, too – to LA to reunite with their sons Alastair, 19, and Aiden, 14, and meet their fifth grandchild, Kimberly Stewart’s new baby boy. (“He’s adorable, and Kim is doing a great job!”, she gushes.)

As well as his boys with Lancaster, plus Kimberly, 45, and Sean, 44 – his children from his first marriage to actress Alana Stewart – Rod shares Renée, 32, and Liam, 30, with second wife, model Rachel Hunter, plus another daughter, Ruby, 37, from his romance with model Kelly Emberg. He fathered his eldest child, Sarah Streeter, 61, at 18, before putting her up for adoption. “We’re already talking about Christmas because we have to figure that stuff out in advance,” says Lancaster. “It’s very hard to get everybody together.”

Stewart is also extremely busy, working on two new albums, a book and planning another new tour, hot on the heels of his Glastonbury show this summer. But at 80 – and after a bout of flu in June that forced him to cancel tour dates in the US – is it time for Lancaster’s other half to ease up and really put his health first? “Him being busy is looking after his health, because it’s what brings him joy, it’s what makes Rod Rod,” she responds. “If he didn’t work, it would all stop. His body wouldn’t know what to do.”

Thank the stars for Bluebell…

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