He’s fathered SEVEN youngsters with surrogates. Boasted he as soon as spent £4million on Christmas. My day with Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, the proud poster boy for homosexual dads

Like so many couples, Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow had a recognisable dynamic in their long-standing partnership.

As I noticed instantly when I was sent to interview them for the Daily Mail in February 2004, the softly spoken Tony, now 62, was the quieter one; the flamboyant Barrie, 57, the more outgoing joker, with a penchant for garish designer wear and a tendency to dominate the conversation.

On occasion, Tony struggled to get a word in. So far, so familiar – many couples are yin to each other’s yang.

Yet even – perhaps especially – back then, the Drewitt-Barlows were very far from an ordinary couple. Five years previously, in 1999, they had made history as Britain’s first officially recognised ‘gay dads’.

Having welcomed twins Saffron and Aspen via surrogate, the duo successfully lobbied to be recognised as same-sex parents on the birth certificates, becoming ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two’ instead of ‘mother’ and ‘father’.

In other words, the Drewitt-Barlows – wealthy businessmen whose collective fortune has been estimated at anything between £40million and £175million – were pioneers, a role they embraced with gusto. As Barrie Drewitt-Barlow once declared in one of his many interviews with a glossy lifestyle magazine: ‘We are the poster boys for same-sex parenting.’

Since then, much has happened. There were three more children together via a different surrogate, a civil partnership and then a wedding. But there were also fall-outs with an egg donor and one of their surrogates, and the marriage did not last. The couple split in 2019.

Barrie has gone on to have two more surrogate babies with his new partner Scott, formerly his personal assistant.

Yet even against this carousel of evolving plotlines, it was impossible to predict the latest chapter.

Yesterday, Barrie and Scott Drewitt-Barlow, 32, appeared in court charged with multiple offences of rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation. The pair ‘strenuously denied’ the allegations.

As for Tony – who is not involved in the police investigation – he now lives in Florida, where the couple moved in 2016 after purchasing a £6million, ten-bedroom mansion in Tampa, complete with swimming pool, grotto and spa. He and Barrie are said to be amicably divorced.

In Florida, there was shock at the news of Barrie’s arrest. ‘It’s hard to believe these allegations,’ Sandy Wiezycki, 58, told the Daily Mail. She has known Barrie since 2012, when she started working for the Drewitt-Barlows’ consumer research company in the US.

‘Barrie’s always been a happy-go-lucky guy and a big character… But he’s devoted to his children and to his work. I haven’t seen Barrie lately because he travels a lot. I know he’s been in England and I’m hoping this is all a mistake… I’m shocked.’

Yesterday, police vehicles and forensic teams could still be seen at the vast modern home in Danbury, Essex, owned by Drewitt-Barlow, one of many lavish properties acquired by the businessman over the years.

He’s known to be generous with his money. In June 2023 Saffron, now 26, revealed that Barrie had bought her a £200,000 Range Rover Vogue as a ‘push present’ after giving birth to her first daughter. She is now a mother of two. The previous Christmas, Barrie claimed to have spent an eye-watering £4million on presents for his family.

Roll back the clock nearly 40 years, however, and in 1987, Tony had a thriving career as a dermatologist and was also engaged to be married to a woman. But that year, he got lost on his way to a magazine awards ceremony and stopped at a petrol station in Manchester to ask for directions.

He was overheard by Barrie, whose car had broken down and who offered to help him on his way. Within two weeks, Tony had called off the wedding and embarked on a relationship with Barrie. The duo moved to London, where Barrie trained as a social worker and Tony founded a consumer cosmetics testing company. Huge wealth followed – the couple enjoyed collecting Faberge eggs – but one thing was missing: children.

The pair considered adoption, but with gay adoption prohibited at the time, they contacted a doctor in Beverly Hills to explore the possibility of surrogacy. What followed made history. Using donor eggs from one woman, their twins were then carried in the womb of another woman, before being born in the US in December 1999.

The endeavour was said to have cost in the region of £200,000 – around £400,000 in today’s money – some of it spent on legal fees in their battle to get both their names on the birth certificates.

By the time we met in 2004, the twins were five and, using another surrogate, the Drewitt-Barlows had welcomed another addition to the family – a baby boy.

Created from the same ‘batch’ of fertilised eggs as his elder siblings – his embryo had lain frozen in a Californian laboratory ever since their conception. Barrie also set up his own surrogacy service, the British Surrogacy Centre, which remains operational today.

On the surface, then, they had it all: a vast home – then in Cheshire – expensive cars, wardrobes full of designer clothes and apparently plenty of money in the bank.

But there were strained relations with their donor and birth mother – though both were said to have reconciled with the Drewitt-Barlows in later years – and some criticised their lavish parenting style, concerned that the twins would grow up spoilt.

In 2004, the couple were living in Spain because they said they had received death threats from those who didn’t approve of them being fathers.

Six years later, the pair announced the arrival of twins. This time, the donor eggs were provided by a Brazilian model whom Barrie had reportedly spotted on a catwalk and paid £35,000 for the privilege of accessing her striking genes.

‘We know that some people don’t approve, or think it’s immoral, but we think they should just get on with their own lives and let us get on with ours,’ Tony told me.

Getting on with their lives, it turned out, involved a dizzying series of house moves, as the duo – who became civil partners in 2006 and married in 2014 – settled first in Hertfordshire, then Essex, and finally the US.

Perhaps, though, it was tempting fate when, in 2015, Tony – who had overcome throat cancer after being diagnosed in 2006 – gave an interview declaring they would ‘never’ split up.

Fast forward four years, however, and it emerged they had separated – ‘no longer compatible as husbands’, as Barrie put it – although they continued living together in Tampa.

Not long after came a twist: Barrie had begun a relationship with his former personal assistant, Scott Hutchison, and the trio were living together, albeit with separate wings of the house.

At the time, it was reported that Scott had previously been in a relationship with Saffron before becoming involved with Barrie – although Barrie later insisted this was fake news concocted by the youngsters as a smokescreen because Scott was not yet ready to come out as a gay man.

Either way, the extended family – five children, three fathers – continued living together in what Barrie described as a ‘very 21st-century family set-up’, with the trio acting as ‘dad, daddy and stepdad’. Scott even adopted the Drewitt-Barlow surname.

The following year, in September 2020, it emerged that Barrie and Scott had welcomed a surrogate daughter. ‘She really is the most spoilt little girl in the world,’ a post on the family website breathlessly declared.

‘She not only has two doting dads that give her everything she could ever want, but she has an extended family of siblings and Uncle Tony that just shower her with love…’ In August 2022, it emerged Barrie and Scott had also had a son.

Whatever lies behind the latest startling headlines, one can only imagine the strain on their extensive – and extended – family.

‘What a tangled web we weave,’ Barrie told me in 2004, talking about the twists and turns their lives had taken. Of all the many things he said, perhaps that has proved the most accurate.