Me, Donna and the gorillas

Damian Aspinall, all 6ft 3in of him, is sitting awkwardly in his armchair in front of a fake fire in the drawing room of his huge Chelsea home.

It's a magnificent place with a huge central staircase spiralling up towards the heavens, but instead of being full of antiques, it's stuffed to the gills with paintings of animals - deer, birds, monkeys, giraffes, elephants and, of course, gorillas. "Yes, the gorillas!" says Aspinall, referring to the primates at Howletts, the zoo in Kent his father, the legendary John Aspinall, set up many years ago.

"When the gorillas haven't seen me for a while," he says, "they race to the edge of their pen so I can stroke them. I remember doing it as a child. It was so comforting and amazing." He is obviously entranced by animals in the same way his father was. He bounces up and down on his chair when he tells me about his latest wheeze. "We've taken them back to Africa!" he says.

He and his friend, designer Patrick Cox, and Aspinall's girlfriend and mother of his baby daughter, the TV presenter Donna Air, have just made a documentary about releasing seven gorillas back into the wild in Gabon. "Everyone thinks we're crazy," he says. "All those animal-world people keep telling us that the gorillas won't cope. I disagree. We have bred more animals in Howletts - gorillas, elephants and black rhino - than anywhere else in the world. I know what I'm doing."

Well, he seems just like his father - as stubborn, as determined, as whacky as the man who had tigers wandering loose in his grounds. "But my father wasn't crazy," says Aspinall. "He was a conservationist.

Everyone thought he was mad to have animals wandering round, but he wanted them to be happy."

Animals were part of Damian Aspinall's pretty unconventional childhood. He moved to Howletts aged four when his father, an inveterate gambler, won the money to buy the house after a huge win at the races. "Before that," says Aspinall, "we lived in Eaton Square with a leopard, a Himalayan bear and a capuchin monkey. My father used to walk the leopard at 3am so no one saw him. We moved when he realised that there were just too many animals to fit into the flat."

At the beginning, the zoo was private and animals wandered everywhere. "I would wake up in the morning next to a chimp. I would eat my breakfast with the gorillas and then watch the bear and the tiger play on the lawn." It all sounds pretty idyllic, I say. "It wasn't," he says, and his face darkens.

It turns out he had a pretty loveless childhood. His parents divorced when he was six, on the grounds of his mother's adultery, and he never saw his mother, Jane Gordon Hastings, ever again. Poor her, I say. "Poor me!" Aspinall says. "Imagine being a small boy and never hearing from your mother again. Not once. It was a very bitter divorce and my father was absolutely determined that I should have no contact with my mother. I grew up motherless and it has left a terrible gap in my life."

On top of all that, it turns out that his father didn't even really want him that much himself. "I had barely no relationship with my father. He had a favourite in the family (Aspinall has a younger brother and sister) and he made it perfectly clear it wasn't me. He packed me off to Millfield to board when I was six and then never came to one single thing I was in. Other boys had their parents there at sports day but my father never came. Now I realise that he was disappointed with me because I was not very bright, and he was."

Aspinall was also cripplingly shy. "I had very few friends," he says. The only thing he really loved was to play music. "But my father hated music," he says. "We were not allowed to listen to it or play any musical instrument."

After he left school at 16 to travel the world, Aspinall taught himself the guitar. "Do you know that just before my father died (three years ago, of cancer), I was sitting in my cottage on the estate playing my guitar and I saw him walk past the window and I threw the guitar under the table. Isn't that ridiculous?"

Even sadder, after he became an adult with his own life and income, he never contacted his mother before her death seven years ago. "I ask myself about that constantly," he says. "Why didn't I find her? But my father had drummed the fact I wasn't to see my mother so deeply into me that I never went against his wishes. I find that very hard now."

Yet it's Damian Aspinall who has taken over Howletts. When he speaks about his work he seems perfectly confident. He's very much "my way is the right way". "I hate being told I can't do something," he says. "I actively oppose employing anyone with a zoology degree because they will bring a rationality with them and I will not have that!" He likes to emphasise the fact that he's rather intolerant. "I can tell a good person from yards off," he says. "I'll look at them and I'll say to Donna, 'I don't like that person', and she'll wonder why but she always trusts my instincts. And if anyone questions me I will say, openly, 'that man is a fake'."

I think his ruthlessness is, essentially, bluff. To disguise his fears, he postures and poses. He calls himself Silverback and the Lion. He calls his friend Tara Palmer-Tomkinson "cublet". He sees himself as a dominant male there to protect and provide. His ex-wife, Louise Sebag-Montefiore, with whom he has two daughters Clary, 11, and Tansy, 14, lives on a cottage on his estate. They divorced on account of Aspinall's adultery with a model called Kirsty Roper. "We were together for 15 years but we parted," he says. "I don't like that. I think life is all about family. But it happened and we get on very well. I think she is a fantastic woman and mother, and I make sure that she'll never want for anything."

He's obviously a very generous, if somewhat unpredictable, friend. He does legendary, mad things. His 30th birthday party involved naked Zulu warriors throwing cream cakes all over his nicely turned-out friends. When his childhood friend Jemima Khan had her first fashion show, he bought up all her stock and gave his female friends a wonderful dinner at San Lorenzo plus a free Jemima-dress each. Yet it smacks of wanting to be liked.

Aren't we back to the lonely boy who felt so nervous he barely spoke? "Maybe I was like that when I was younger," he says. "I've never had any confidence. When I walk into parties now I feel as though I have two huge, clumsy feet. I know I don't have the savoir-faire that others have. When I was dating some of the world's most beautiful women [including Naomi Campbell, Normandie Keith, Petrina Khashoggi] I was convinced some were only with me for the money."

Donna Air has obviously played a major part in Aspinall's emotional rehabilitation. "We met at a dinner party," says Aspinall. "I thought she was very beautiful so I plucked up the courage to talk to her. I asked her if she liked animals and she said 'not really' and it was such a relief after all these women who had gone on about how they loved animals just to get close to me."

They are considered a bit of an odd couple - her a 24-year-old Newcastle lass with a working-class background and him, the 42-year-old posh boy who's made a rumoured £42 million, initially by investing in property. Then again, they are both self-made in many ways. Aspinall tells me that his father was not at all upper-class. "He was a love-child who came from a naval family," he says. "He didn't know he was illegitimate until he was about 20 when his mother's husband, the man he thought was his father, refused to pay his gambling debts on the grounds that they weren't related. He found his real father a few years later living in penury in Brighton in some ex-servicemen flats."

Aspinall is very proud of the fact he made his own money and never accepted a penny from his father. "Everyone else lived off his money and he owned them, " he says. "I refused to be owned." After he made his millions, his father would tell everyone how proud he was of his eldest son. "He'd put his arm around me and say 'chip off the old block' and I'd smile, but inside I thought it was all phoney. Why was I more lovable because I was rich?"

He has, he says, consciously decided to be a very different kind of father. He is very hands-on with his four-week-old baby girl, Freya. "I am very happy," he says. "Donna is an amazing woman and a wonderful mother. I wouldn't have bred with her if I didn't think that." Bred? "Can't help it," he says. "I always go back to animal terminology." Within the next few weeks, and with Donna's full approval, he will give the baby to the gorillas. "It's a ritual," he says. "I'll probably give her to the dominant female who will then take her off, sex her, and introduce her to the others. I did this with my other daughters, now it's Freya's turn." That's very trusting of him, I say. He looks startled. "But why would I not trust them?" he says. "I know them. I grew up with them. They are my friends." He tells me he has a small but very loyal band of human friends. He makes few new friends. Most recent are Natalie Appleton and her husband Liam Howlett (no connection to the zoo). It turns out, much to his surprise, that having been banned from music, he's a rather good songwriter. "I wrote the Appletons' hit single Don't Worry and four songs on their album." He's very proud of this. "I've written one about Donna ... it's probably very soppy but I like it." I imagine he's a pretty formidable foe. He tells me that if someone doesn't show loyalty to him, he cuts them out of his life forever. "I need to know that if my back is against the wall, my friends are there for me. If someone doesn't back me then they're out. I am the most loyal person you could find." In that he sounds more like his father than he'd probably care to. After all, it was Aspinall senior who became famous not so much for his work with his animals but for supposedly spiriting Lord Lucan away after he'd murdered his nanny. "But what people never really understood about my father is that he loved his animals more than anything. What people don't know about me is that, as much as I love the animals, I also love real breathing humans. I think that's the right way round," he says. "Don't you?"

Damian Aspinall's trip to the Gabon is documented in Gorilla, Gorilla to be shown on Animal Planet tonight at 10pm. For more information about Howletts and the John Aspinall Foundation log on to www.howletts.net