Calum Bests Humiliating Fall from Grace Revealed

Outside ’s exclusive Kabaret Club on an icy November night in 2006, a group of photographers waited.

They were crowding around the notorious Kensington haunt where Hollywood A-list actress  and her on-again-off-again boyfriend were said to be partying.

As the pair emerged looking bleary-eyed and intoxicated, they strode into a waiting car and were whisked away, but not before the paps captured the man in question: the smiling face of Lohan’s then-boyfriend and TV’s ultimate bad boy, Calum Best.

The relationship, of course, did not last but, even though it’s been 20 years since their liaison, many in showbiz still marvel at how a ‘nobody reality star’ bagged one of the most famous women in the world.

Back then, however, the only son of the football legend George Best, with his blond good looks, dark hazel eyes and smooth-talking ways, could have got any woman he wanted.

And indeed he did; over the two decades, the tattooed Lothario is said to have dated the likes of the late  star , actress - one-time girlfriend of the s brother James – The Only Way Is Essex star and model .

But now, I’m told, the former Love Island contestant and Big Brother star, 45, can’t seem to pin a girl down for longer than ten minutes. I hear his date in a central London restaurant walked out on him before the cocktails even arrived.

‘She seemed like she had gone to the loo,’ one onlooker of the ordeal tells me. ‘But then she never came back, he was just waiting there with the two drinks he had ordered.’

Last year, Best was named ambassador for the over-30s matchmaking site Cherry Dating UK, where hopefuls fill out psychological questionnaires and are allocated handpicked matches accordingly.

It came after Best revealed on a podcast with Rylan Clark that, despite his colourful dating history, he had only said ‘I love you’ to someone at the age of 44.

‘I hadn’t been in love until recently,’ he told the Good Morning Britain host. ‘I was humbled for the first time... I met the girl last year and for the first time in my 44 years, I felt, “This is what I’ve been looking for, this feeling I haven’t had before”.

‘It was the first time I outwardly said, “I love you”. We spoke about having a kid. We spoke about having a family... Maybe I’m late to the game, but that’s just how my path is.’

The woman, who remained unnamed, moved to Los Angeles and the relationship ended but Best insisted they were on good terms.

He also told Rylan, 37, about how a stray cat had taught him how to say ‘I love you’.

He said: ‘A little scrawny, runt thing with a wonky eye. I called it Little One. She’d show up, then leave... then one night, like a month later, she comes and hops on the bed and spends the night.

‘This cat opened me up to more love, I know it sounds silly, but I look at it and I say, “I love you”. At 44, I hadn’t said it to a partner but I said it to a cat... I look at this little thing and I go, “Thank you for showing me this little cute, affectionate love.”’

Best first appeared on TV in two series of ITV’s Celebrity Love Island in 2005 and 2006.

It was here he established himself as a love rat – a reputation he would spend the next two decades trying to shift.

During this time, however, his beloved father passed away from organ failure following years of alcohol abuse.

Reflecting on how this affected him, Best told Clark: ‘There was a point during that time that I built up this reputation [as a serial dater] that I didn’t give a crap about anything or anyone.

‘When my old man passed away, I remember I had a real “screw everyone” [mentality].

‘It was literally shoulders shrugged, a real closed-off, angry, don’t care about anybody attitude.

‘Some might say it was an excuse, but that was just how I was affected when I lost my old man. It came to the point of just “Screw everyone, I’m going to do what I want to do”.’

The same year, in 2005, the Celebrity Big Brother star met the Girls Aloud star Sarah Harding at the Elle Awards show and the pair dated for what turned out to be ‘eight months of madness’.

‘I was crazy, she was crazy,’ he said at the time, ‘And that’s why we hit it off from the start.

‘Goddamn, we were going out every night; we were going nuts.

‘She was always so adventurous, and it was one mad night after another. It was a whirlwind, an intense, full-on, fiery relationship. But it was good fire.

‘There was always a lot of passion between us.’

He admitted that his relationship with the singer, who died from advanced breast cancer aged 39 in 2021, was one of his ‘favourite memories’ – and told of a three-day romp with her.

‘We went to this spa in the countryside,’ he said, ‘And spent three whole days on our king-size bed – obviously we weren’t watching TV – as well as in the jacuzzi and in the steam room.

‘We didn’t get dressed once, and the most either of us ever wore was a spa robe and slippers. That’s one of my favourite memories.’

But their relationship ‘fizzled out’ when Calum told the singer he wasn’t ready for anything serious.

He moved on with Rod Stewart’s daughter, Kimberly, now 46, and they were pictured hugging on the red carpet at London’s biggest events such as Fashion Week, the Elle Style Awards and club nights throughout late 2006 and they remained friends despite their romance fizzling out.

In 2006 he was spotted with the Mean Girls actress and ’wild child’ Lindsay Lohan.

They were first spotted together leaving the Kabaret Club in London on that November night and then were seen on a romantic getaway to the Bahamas, where they kissed and frolicked in the sea together.

A couple of months later, Lindsay, who was then 20, and Calum, then 26, were photographed kissing at the Nylon Magazine party in New York.

But reflecting on the on-again-off-again two-year relationship in his memoir Second Best: My Dad and Me, the son of the late Northern Ireland and Manchester United footballer said the relationship was, ‘Some of the worst moments of my life’.

Writing in the present tense, he penned: ‘The two of us together are combustible. At this moment in our lives, we’re both a bit nuts. We both like to party a lot and it makes things tempestuous.

‘When we go out I flirt with other girls. Sometimes in front of her and one day she catches me hanging out with another girl in my hotel room.’

The reality star was also caught having a ‘debaucherous’ night with an escort after pictures were published of his drug-fuelled tryst with her.

‘There’s one of me in a towel, one of me doing a line of coke,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve been caught on tape with drugs and hookers... I am now really, truly f***ed.

Safe to say, the relationship with Lohan ended there.

In an interview in 2010, the Freaky Friday star dismissed their relationship as ‘over really quickly and not worth talking about’.

Calum, however, went on to date the glamour model, Georgia Salpa in 2011, but she dumped him after he was pictured partying with the socialite Donna Air and reportedly returning to her apartment late at night.

Two years later, the TV star admitted he had cheated on Georgia after repeatedly denying the accusations.

Talking about his relationship with the model, he said: ‘We hung out for a while. We were with each other for a good few months. We travelled around.

‘We went to Jamaica together. We had a great time together. But it just didn’t really work out, you know? Because I got caught cheating.’