[Red Moon]

Drinking, a secret son and firing a shotgun during a family row: The terrible truth about celebrity chef John Burton Race

Taking a deep breath and bracing herself, Kim Burton Race switched on the television and turned to the reality show I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!

Having vowed not to watch her estranged husband during his stint in the jungle, she had allowed curiosity to get the better of her.

Just moments later, trembling with anger and disbelief, she switched it off, sickened by what she had seen.

The jovial John Burton Race, laughing and joking as he cooked dinner for the other contestants, bore little relation to the man to whom she was married for 11 years and who, according to her, is a violent, bullying drunk who left her and their six children last March to live with his mistress and their love-child.

Today, in a candid and emotional interview, Kim reveals:

• How Burton Race's drinking often led to verbal and physical abuse of her and the children.

•How he fired a shotgun during an argument with one daughter at their Devon home.

•How he took their children to clandestine meetings at the beach with his mistress, artist Suzi Ward, telling them she was a woman called 'Jane' from the local tourist board.

• How she finally discovered the affair – and his secret two-year-old son – via a text message.

• How she was forced to close their Michelin-starred restaurant, The New Angel in Dartmouth, after learning of significant debt.

• And how, despite entering the marriage with a £2million property portfolio, she expects a divorce settlement of just a few thousand pounds.

Kim, 42, says: "I watched John on I'm A Celebrity just once, and that was enough. Seeing him on TV was too painful – it brought back all the anger and hurt I felt when I discovered his affair and he left us.

"I couldn't believe that he had gone off to the jungle after leaving our family and the business in such a mess. It was further proof that he is capable of thinking only of himself."

The Burton Races rose to fame with their Channel 4 programme French Leave in 2002.

It followed their move to France with their children – Eve, now 21, Olivia, 18, Martha, 17, and Eliza, 12, from Kim's first marriage, and Charles, ten, and Amelia, eight, the couple's children together.

But Kim admits that the rosy family life portrayed to millions of viewers was a far cry from reality.

For years, she says, Burton Race, 49, had been drinking heavily and his erratic behaviour had made him increasingly difficult to live with. On one occasion, he woke two of their daughters at 6am, insisting they help him clean the fridge.

On another, Martha was woken at 4am by music blaring from the CD player in Burton Race's Porsche.

"We looked out to see him flat-out on the decking beside the open door of the car," says Kim.

"He was in a drunken stupor, lying in his own urine.

"I became so accustomed to his mood swings, during which he'd scream and shout abuse at whoever crossed his path, that they seemed normal.

"Friends and family stopped coming to visit us. Nobody said anything but I knew they couldn't bear to have John around.

"When guests came over he might say hello – or he might ignore them. But despite his behaviour, I was in love with him right up to the point I discovered that he'd cheated on me."

It was after the family returned to England in late 2003 to live in Devon that his behaviour changed irrevocably – the result, Kim now realises, of the strain of leading a double life.

Burton Race began an affair with Suzi Ward in 2004, and in January 2005 she gave birth to their son.

"Return Of The Chef, the follow-up to French Leave on Channel 4, was supposed to be all about the family," says Kim.

"We opened The New Angel intending it to be a real family business. Eve worked in the office and the girls were waitresses on Saturday evenings.

"But John was leading another life with someone else. It makes me so angry that he used us to present himself as a caring family man when the reverse is true. He was living a lie on the TV screen."

Around the time his love-child was born, Kim recalls: "We came home one night after dinner with friends to find Eve in the kitchen with her boyfriend, a boy John loathed. Olivia was up, too.

"John had been drinking heavily and began ranting and raving. He was swearing and vowing to kill this boy. I thought he was joking but he staggered into the utility room, unlocked the shotgun cabinet and began loading it.

"Eve ushered her boyfriend out of the kitchen while Olivia and I tried to wrestle the gun off John.

"He was in a really black rage. Olivia was pushed to the floor and we were both hit in the face with the gun butt.

"Then he pulled the trigger and fired into the floor. I was terrified. Eve and her boyfriend fled the house and phoned the police. I begged John to stop.

"Eventually he calmed down and I said, 'You'd better get out of here.'"

That sounds so stupid now, but I was covering up for him as usual. He drove a few miles to the village of Strete – to his girlfriend, I later found out – claiming he needed a walk on the beach to clear his head.

"'Within a few minutes there were police everywhere. They questioned me closely and I'm afraid I suggested there must have been a mistake.

"I shouldn't have done that but I was very, very scared. John could have blown our heads off. He loved those guns. One was a Beretta, the other a special-edition Browning worth £7,500. I bought them both for him as Christmas presents.

"The police took them and my solicitor has since lodged a formal objection against his attempts to get them back."

At the time, Devon and Cornwall Police confirmed that officers attended a "disturbance" allegedly involving a shotgun.

A spokesman said: "No one was arrested and no further action was taken." When the rows became too much last Christmas, Kim ordered Burton Race out of their £1.5million Georgian rectory in the picturesque village of Ashprington.

She allowed him to return the next day, but rumours began circulating in Dartmouth society that her husband was sleeping with a woman from Strete and that he had fathered her son.

Kim says: "I refused to believe it. I honestly believed people were confusing him with The New Angel's restaurant manager, who was also called John and had become a father after a relationship with another staff member."

Burton Race would take his youngest children, Charles and Amelia, with him to meet Ms Ward at Blackpool Sands and Slapton Lee, coastal beauty spots to the west of Dartmouth.

He would take the children horseriding, telling them that the woman he met afterwards was "Jane" from the local tourism office. Brazenly, he told his wife that "the woman with the really cute kid" he had been working with on some projects had been deserted by a South African vet.

When the rumours persisted, Kim checked his mobile phone. The record of all dialled and received calls had been deleted, further raising her suspicions.

But when she confronted him, he simply said it was his way of managing a large volume of calls. When asked outright if he was cheating, she was told: "How could I want anyone else when I've got you?"

Incredibly, just hours before she discovered the truth, they planned a new life together over an intimate lunch at a luxury waterfront hotel in Dartmouth.

He spoke of moving the family abroad and keeping a cottage in Devon for business visits.

They returned home and spent the afternoon with the children.

"It was a proper family atmosphere," Kim recalls, "and yet 48 hours later we were finished."

On Saturday, March 10, this year, Kim says Burton Race returned home at 4am after a heavy drinking session.

"He was totally out of his head," she says.

"He must have had a dreadful hangover in the morning but he had to take the children horseriding."

As Burton Race showered soon after 9am, his phone beeped with an incoming text message. Curious, Kim opened it to read: "Good Morning X."

Suddenly, her husband's betrayal was clear.

"I burst into the bathroom demanding to know who would send a message like that," she says.

"He refused to talk about it. He claimed that the X wasn't really a kiss. He was so used to lying that he would try to lie even about the blatantly obvious.

"I stormed out shouting that I was going to ring the number. And I did. This woman, Suzi Ward, answered.

"I asked her name but she just replied, 'Who are you looking for? Who do you want?' I demanded to know what was going on and she coolly told me to ask my husband about the situation.

"Then she said, 'Anyway, what are you doing reading your husband's text essages?'

"I couldn't believe it. Here was the woman who had shattered our family suggesting that I was in the wrong. In her place I would have been trembling. I could not believe her chutzpah."

Kim then confronted her husband again. Asked to name the woman, he replied: "Someone I like."

He admitted he had been having an affair for three years and had fathered a child by her. When pressed for further details, he said he did not want to discuss it.

"At that point I descended into a black rage," confesses Kim.

"How dare he tell me he didn't want to discuss it. I felt the most unbelievable anger and I became very violent, I'm afraid. I kicked, punched and scratched him.

"I tore the T-shirt off his back and screamed at him. Then he admitted he was going to live with her.

"I told him to get out. Part of me wonders whether he thought I was going to help pack his things. He is so incredibly arrogant and nothing is ever his fault. He loves his celebrity status, being the centre of attention.

"John showed no contrition. After he'd left I made a bonfire of his clothes in the garden. Since he has gone our home life is calmer. But the children and I feel totally betrayed." The worst act of betrayal, Kim says, was that he had used their children as a smokescreen to cover up his affair.

"When the local paper carried a picture of John and Suzi Ward together, the kids said, 'Oh, that's Jane. She's the woman we see at the beach after horseriding.'"

"I remembered the kids mentioning this woman and I'd casually asked them about her. They said she was just someone Dad knew from the tourism office

"Throughout all this I never once smelt a rat, never believed John had someone else. People might think I'm naive but if you love someone then you trust them, and if you trust them you believe what they say.

"I do feel foolish now for believing all his lies, but being in love with someone is about trust. Without trust there's nothing."

Since leaving I'm A Celebrity, Burton Race has stated that Kim's closure of The New Angel on November 27 was a result of spite, saying: "She wants revenge. It's a woman scorned."

But Kim says her decision is based on the realities of the business, which has been failing badly for some time. She says Burton Race had been warned as long ago as September 2006 by managers that the restaurant, a favourite with Devon's "yachtie" set, had no future.

They pointed out that suppliers were growing uneasy about late payments. But according to Kim, Burton Race simply instructed staff to "give them a bit more".

A year later, however, the business was surviving on whatever cash was in the till.

After being called to an emergency meeting with staff on November 22, Kim realised that the restaurant was in serious financial difficulties.

"Our bank manager agreed to pay one last week of wages but the decision to close had been made for me.

"This is nothing to do with my relationship with John – it's about doing the right thing in business."

At the height of its fortunes, The New Angel included a cookery school and a "top table" service in which Burton Race acted as personal chef to private parties.

When the couple first met in the mid-Nineties, Kim was already a successful businesswoman in her own right.

She and her first husband built up a travel brokering business, in which they block-booked airline seats and sold them on to charter operators.

Their company, Avro plc, had a turnover of £175million and was bought by Monarch Airlines, now part of Cosmos.

Kim then started a property business, buying and renovating large houses.

Her marriage crumbled and she began seeing Burton Race, who was also married. She insists that on her side there was no dishonesty. They married in January 1997.

Burton Race was building a reputation through his work at L'Ortolan restaurant in Berkshire and in 2001 he secured two Michelin stars as head chef of the Landmark Hotel in London.

A third star was awarded within three months of opening The New Angel and a lucrative cookery book deal soon followed.

But despite his success, Kim claims that she has constantly struggled to keep him on the straight and narrow.

"John has always been a real handful," she says.

"He played hard and he didn't care about the consequences.

"During French Leave, the film crew would come over for ten days each month and he'd be up for hours drinking with them.

"On one occasion he got into a massive row with a taxi driver, who dumped him in the street. The French police were called and it could all have turned nasty. I had to deal with the fall-out. It was always like this. The mother in me just trying to keep him straight."

She says that his drinking was often "embarrassing".

"He'd fly into ridiculous jealous rages because some man looked at me sideways for a second. He would walk out of restaurants in the middle of dinner without any explanation to his fellow diners.

"Staff at our restaurant have had to put up with so much foul-mouthed abuse. Perhaps he thinks that's how celebrity chefs behave."

Kim says she decided to speak out because she feels Burton Race has attempted to portray her as the cause of their business and personal problems.

"I've tried to get on with it, keep the children together and maintain my dignity," she says.

"But I've had enough of him rubbing my nose in the mess he's left. There's only so much you can take.

"John froze me out of our company. Until last week I had no idea of our trading figures because he wouldn't tell me. He hasn't paid our mortgage for four months yet he can drive around in a new Porsche while she has a new BMW X3."

Kim expects very little from the divorce settlement.

"I will come out with virtually nothing. There's an £800,000-plus mortgage on our house plus various bank loans. The restaurant building is part of a pension fund I can't touch until I'm 55.

"I went into my relationship with John holding a property portfolio worth at least £2million. I twice bailed him out when his business at the Landmark Hotel ran into trouble in the Nineties. Now I'm bailing him out again."

Kim says that since the split, Burton Race has made no attempt to see his children and appears to have cut them out of his life.

"The first contact I had from his lawyers was to demand the handover of his shotguns and artwork," she claims.

He, on the other hand, said in a recent TV interview that his children were his top priority, adding: "I'm having a real problem trying to see mine."

Earlier this year, Burton Race starred in two TV series, Kitchen Criminals and Britain's Best Dish.

Before his affair was exposed he had been planning a new show with his wife in which they revealed favourite family recipes.

"It was to be called Real Family, Real Food," says Kim.

"Unfortunately, the title turned out to be only half-true."

Source: Daily Mail