Nicholas Ashley-Cooper: Earl of Shaftesbury & Lough Neagh owner’s background, family & estate explained

The UK’s largest lake, which is being plagued with toxic blue-green algae, is partly owned by English aristocrat Nicholas Ashley-Cooper. Ashley-Cooper, the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, owns the bed and banks of the Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland - while its water is publicly owned.

The ownership of parts of the lake has been in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s estate since the 1800s. The lake supplies half of Belfast’s drinking water and 40% of Northern Ireland’s overall, and Ashley-Cooper was thrust into being at the centre of the debate over the state of its water. Ashley-Cooper was not heir to the estate. He became head of the family after his father was murdered in 2004 and his brother suddenly died not long after.

Recently a vigil was held by over 100 campaigners who described it as a wake for the lake. Many dressed in black carried a coffin to the shoreline to represent their concerns that the lake is “dying” due to pollution. As public outrage over the polluted and toxic waters in the lake escalates, the earl has said he is still willing to sell it to the public - but won’t give it away for free. He has also called for a new independent body to be set up to control and protect all of the interests in Lough Neagh.

He added that the state of the waters in the lake was not his responsibility - but critics have described him as an absentee landlord. He told BBC News: "We need better control and better management, so really it comes back to that central management body that actually has teeth and can take action to monitor the levels of pollution that are coming into the lough."

When asked if he took any personal responsibility for the current situation, the earl told BBC NI: “The issues at the moment are to do with the water and our ownership is the bed and soil so the current situation is not our responsibility. We are a stakeholder though of Lough Neagh so we are very keen to be proactive in these discussions about how we come to a solution.”

What happened to his father?

In 2004, his father Anthony, the 10th Earl, went missing from his hotel on the French Riviera. It later transpired that he had been murdered by the brother of his third wife, Jamila M’Barek. Anthony’s badly-decomposed body was found in a remote ravine in the Alps in 2005. Anthony Ashley-Cooper’s third wife was former nightclub hostess Jamila and was found guilty of paying her brother Mohammed to murder her husband.

The prosecution said Ms M’Barek paid her brother 150,000 euros (£105,000) to kill the earl, because he was in the process of divorcing her and denying her the chance to inherit valuable properties in France and Ireland. Both M’Bareks were convicted in 2007 and were each jailed for 25 years. Soon after the discovery of his father’s body, Nicholas’ brother, the eldest son, died of a heart attack aged 27.

Who is Nicholas Ashley-Cooper?

Ashley-Cooper was 25 years old when he became the 12th Earl and inherited Giles House in Dorset. The mansion was built in 1650 and was one of the finest stately homes in the UK but had crumbled after being left empty after the Second World War.

Ashley-Cooper moved into the mansion permanently in 2009 with his then-girlfriend, Dinah Streifeneder, a veterinary surgeon whom he married a year later. The couple, together with their first child Anthony, moved into a small section of the house that they had borrowed money to restore.

The pair managed to restore almost all of the house, bar a few bedrooms, and it is open to the public. The Earl and Countess went on to have two daughters, Viva and Zara. Ashley-Cooper won the Sotheby’s-sponsored Historic Houses Association Restoration Award for his efforts to restore the mansion.

The earl went from being a “tattooed, raving New York DJ” - as The Daily Telegraph descrbed him - to a disability campaigner and charity patron after his own spinal injury. In 2009 his life changed when a rabbit darted in front of his horse in the family grounds in Dorset, causing him to fall, cracking his middle vertebra.

He spent four months in and out of hospital after his spine was fused together, not knowing if he would ever walk again. After this he became insistent on fundraising and got involved with charity Wings for Life, which helps support people through spinal injury.