One of Britain’s first-ever gay dads to marry his daughter’s ex-boyfriend after proposing during family holiday
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow (R) and fiancé Scott Hutchinson. (Instagram)
One of Britain’s first-ever gay dads proposed to his daughter’s ex-boyfriend last week while the trio was holidaying in Croatia.
Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow became part of history when, in the late 1990s, they became the first queer men in Britain to father children via surrogacy.
But their marriage of 32 years came to an end last year when Barrie announced he was divorcing Tony after falling “head over heels” for his 25-year-old personal assistant Scott Hutchinson, who once dated his 20-year-old daughter Saffron.
The multi-millionaire took to Instagram on Thursday (20 August) to announce he and Hutchinson have gotten hitched. It comes after the duo announced that they are expecting a child through a surrogacy together.
One of Britain’s first gay dads proposes to 25-year-old boyfriend on rose petal-decked boat.
Barrie began the night by posting a photograph of him and his fiancé-to-be by the handrails of a boat in the docks of Hvar, Splitsko-Dalmatinska, off the coast of Split, captioning it: “Tonight may well be the night.”
Indeed, moments later and posing by the same handrails, Barrie shared a slideshow of photographs of he and Scott now wearing engagement rings. He also shared snaps of he and Saffron, including one where they are both blinking when the photograph was taken, showing that she was there when he popped the question.
The day after, Barrie uploaded a video the boat decked out with rose petals and dotted with candles. Teaching “what do you think happened here” as he showed a table packed with bottles of champagne and glasses.
“There’s champagne, there’s roses,” he said in the mobile phone video, “uh, uh, uh, oh… what do you think happened here?
“And is that something over there?”
Both Barrie and his former husband – jointly worth a reported £40 million – live together in their cavernous £6 million Florida mansion. Barrie set up the British Surrogacy Centre of America in 2000, an agency which manages surrogates and egg donor cases across the country.
Speaking to The Sun, Barrie said: “We are thrilled we are going to become daddies again. Tony is excited too, although it does underline that our marriage really is over after all these years, so it is very bittersweet.
“But we are all going to remain living under the same roof. Tony is Dad, I’m Daddy and while at the moment Scott is stepdad, soon he’s going to be Daddy Two.
“We are happy, we want to co-parent our kids and that’s all that matters. If people don’t get it, that’s their problem, not ours.”
