The sun is setting over the Algarve and at a small terrace bar overlooking the padel courts, the DJ has settled into his early evening, crowd-pleasing, stride. As the last rays of a glorious day pour through the window, a small group of women put down their wine glasses and head to the dancefloor.
DJ Johnny Sunset is manning the decks and urges his audience to ‘sit back, relax and enjoy the rosé wine on offer’ in his gentle Scottish burr which, to some, might have an air of familiarity.
For in another place and another time, Johnny Sunset was John Leslie, the star of mainstream TV whose career imploded amid a swirl of sexual allegations – despite his exoneration by the courts.
His life today in Praia da Luz – a resort that will forever be remembered for the tragic disappearance of Madeleine McCann 19 years ago – is far removed from the thrills he once chased in London, living a hedonistic life more suited to a rock star than a former Blue Peter presenter.
Leslie went on to host ITV game show Wheel of Fortune and co-host This Morning with Fern Britton. But now he’s DJing the early Friday evening slot at the Terrace Bar and Kitchen. As he plays the opening notes of Abba’s Dancing Queen, his audience – mostly expats, mostly women in their 50s and 60s (the men are seated with beers) – have their arms in the air, singing along.
With a collarless white linen shirt, a white baseball cap (worn back-to-front) and a tanned wrist loaded with beaded bracelets, Leslie looks relaxed, exuding the air of a man thoroughly enjoying the virtual anonymity of this village on Portugal’s golden coast.
Leslie was last in the public eye in 2020, when he walked on to the steps of Southwark Crown Court in London after he was cleared of sexual assault – the third time he had been prosecuted and vindicated in a storm spanning 17 years.
John Leslie as DJ Johnny Sunset, manning the decks at the Terrace Bar and Kitchen on the Algarve in Portugal
Leslie is now 61, and his hair and designer stubble is snowy white. He’s in the same age group as much of his audience
The scene is a huge contrast to the last time he was in the public eye, on the steps of Southwark Crown Court in London after he was cleared of sexual assault
Not that anyone in Praia da Luz remembers any of that.
As one smiling pensioner says conspiratorially as he watches Leslie from the bar: ‘He did that Blue Peter stuff but he’s much better at mixing tunes.’
Leslie is now 61, and his hair and designer stubble is snowy white. He’s in the same age group as much of his audience, although they are a fairly limber set – golfers and padel players, living the good life now their children, some who probably watched Leslie on Blue Peter, are grown up.
It is in this resort, The Mail can reveal, that Leslie has quietly forged a new life, far removed from the glitz and glamour – and latterly heartache and humiliation – of his time as a household name.
He sold his three-bedroom bungalow in Edinburgh for £720,000 in 2020 and is now sole director of a company with a multi-million-pound portfolio of rental property in the Scottish capital. According to Companies House documents, Les & Lex Ltd, which was set up in 2018 and named after his parents, has seen its portfolio value soar from £3.1million in 2020 to £7.2million last year.
The company owes nearly as much in bank loans and other debts, but crucially it would appear the properties have all gone up in value.
Les & Lex snapped up five flats in Edinburgh’s old town in 2020 for a total of £1,015,000. Those flats were then sold last year to a Perthshire farmer for a total of £1,319,900 – 30 per cent profit.
Yet it is on the windswept, sun-baked shore of the Atlantic that Leslie is understood to have been based for the past five years. He lives in an area on the edge of the village lined with villas with pools and popular with the large expat community, which has adopted ‘Johnny’ as one of its own.
He’s a regular – both as DJ and customer – at the Terrace Bar and Kitchen, within the grounds of the same resort where the McCanns stayed in 2007. In fact, the bar is the latest incarnation of the tapas restaurant where parents Kate and Gerry ate with friends on the night Madeleine went missing.
Leslie is a huge football fan – he supports Edinburgh’s Hibernian FC – and the day after his most recent Friday night DJ slot, Leslie returned to the Terrace to loudly cheer on Celtic as they beat Hibs’ rivals Hearts. He’s also a regular at The Bull, a British-style pub, and at Kelly’s Sports Bar.
Last Sunday he chalked up a new gig, playing his tunes on the sand at Beach Bar Paraiso, where he proclaimed to a collection of locals and holidaymakers that ‘Summer has arrived!’
It’s all very low-key. A bit of drunken stumbling during the Macarena is as colourful as it gets here. On Instagram, where his handle is johnnysunset007, he has just 34 followers and promotes himself as delivering ‘sunset vibes’. ‘Spinning the best of the 70s and 80s,’ he writes. ‘Algarve events, weddings & parties. If there’s a dance floor – it’s full.’
The easy energy and laid-back charm that catapulted Leslie to fame are still there, but there are very few other indicators that the man at the decks once captivated audiences of millions and commanded a lucrative pay packet.
Leslie’s career has, it would seem, gone full circle. Born in Edinburgh, he was 16 when he started to DJ at his local roller-disco, using the money he earned to buy enough records to start DJing at weddings and 18th birthdays, making £100 a week. Next came stints spinning the discs at a five-star Danish hotel, before hitting the nightclub scene.
He was training as a piano technician when he got his first television break on the music magazine show Music Box in 1988, and a year later was asked to audition for Blue Peter, going on to present the show alongside Anthea Turner and Diane-Louise Jordan, who have remained his stalwart supporters and friends.
It was a glamorous existence for the 6ft 4in star – at one point he dated Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Leslie with Yvette Fielding and Diane-Louise Jordan on Blue Peter in the early 1990s
He became a staple of primetime TV, hosting Wheel Of Fortune and This Morning until his career spectacularly derailed in 2002 after he was erroneously named as Ulrika Jonsson’s alleged rapist
Leslie made the leap to primetime, hosting Wheel of Fortune and This Morning until his career spectacularly derailed in 2002 after he was erroneously named as Ulrika Jonsson’s alleged rapist.
She wrote in her autobiography that she had been raped when she was a 19-year-old TV-am weathergirl without naming the culprit.
Then Leslie was accidentally named, live on air, as the man in question by presenter Matthew Wright. While Leslie categorically denied it was him, Ms Jonsson refused to confirm or deny the allegation, and has never revealed the identity of her attacker.
And so it became ‘open season’ on John Leslie – no longer the darling of the TV sofas, but the sex-pest pariah. Days later, photographs appeared in a Sunday newspaper of him taking cocaine, which led to bosses at This Morning terminating his contract.
A sex tape was leaked of Leslie and his then girlfriend, nurse Abi Titmuss, with another woman. Then a steady stream of women came forward to accuse him of ‘improper sexual conduct’ – all of it denied.
In 2003 Leslie was charged with two counts of indecent assault, but walked free from court after prosecutors dropped the case. ‘You are discharged without a single stain on your character,’ said the presiding judge.
And yet, Leslie’s television career was effectively ended. His replacement on the This Morning sofa? Phillip Schofield.
Leslie’s reputation was in tatters, by his own admission, and he couldn’t get a job for four years. He returned to Scotland, buying a bungalow near to his parents’ house and slowly pieced together a career away from the limelight.
He did community radio and landed a contract at Edinburgh’s Radio Forth worth nothing close to the £350,000-a-year he was earning in his heyday.
The allegations, however, kept coming. In 2008 an accuser claimed she had been raped. The case, again denied by Leslie, never reached court.
That same year, one of his ex-girlfriends, Rachel Bentley, revealed he had turned his back on both her and their two-year-old daughter. He is alleged to have sent her a DNA testing kit to confirm the child was his before breaking off contact with the pair for four years. What that relationship is like now is unclear.
The Mail understands that his daughter, now 19, has had an occasionally distant relationship with her dad, although there was a period of time when she saw him reasonably regularly.
Leslie with his then girlfriend Abi Titmuss at Sandown racecourse in 2003
… and arriving at Southwark Crown Court for his trial in 2020
‘Rachel did her best to facilitate contact but sadly John is just so unreliable,’ a source says. ‘It’s like he’s never grown up and faced his responsibilities.’
Eight years ago, Leslie told the Mail: ‘It’s a bit frustrating I can’t be the dad that I’d like to be because we’re so far apart, but I’m trying.’
In 2017, as he was in talks to appear on Celebrity Big Brother for a reputed £500,000 fee, he was accused of putting his hand down the back of a bride-to-be’s trousers during her hen night at an Edinburgh nightclub.
He was acquitted after a two-day trial at Edinburgh Sheriff Court the following year but, as a result, lost his part-time work as a radio and club DJ.
‘I totally accept I’ve brought a lot of this on myself,’ he told the Daily Mail, in the wake of the case. ‘In my 20s and 30s, that wasn’t my finest hour. But I will still say to this day that I’ve never had any signs of anyone being uncomfortable.
‘Even though I was cleared, I still lost,’ he said. ‘It scares the hell out of me the fact that any guy could be put in that situation.
‘Once again, I’ve lost a year of my life. I lost dignity, respect and I’m unemployable again, even though I was acquitted.
‘Previously I’ve somehow been able to pick myself up and dust myself down, but I’ve never felt so sad for so long. The intensity of the last year has brought all the old trauma back.’
It wasn’t long before there was further turmoil. In 2020, he was again in court for allegedly groping a woman at a Christmas bash in London’s West End.
‘I never sexually assaulted anyone. It’s not in my nature,’ he told the jury.
Read More
AMANDA PLATELL: I’ve never owned a Kylie record, but I shed a tear watching her documentary
Appearing under his birth name of John Stott, he called the accusations ‘ludicrous and crazy’ – adding he had been left suicidal after the loss of his TV career.
It took a jury just 23 minutes to clear him with a judge, declaring: ‘Mr Stott, you, for the second time, leave this court without a stain on your character and I hope it will be the last time you have to attend.’
There was, however, no return to the airwaves.
These days it’s Leslie’s younger brother Grant Stott, 59, who is the celebrity presenter in the family.
Stott’s career has followed a similar, but lower-profile, path to his sibling. He works for BBC Radio Scotland, where he was recently named as the presenter of the prestigious weekday afternoon slot, taking over from Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus.
With so much history, and with a brother winning acclaim that he once enjoyed, it’s easy to see why Leslie might prefer the warmer, more distant shores of the Algarve.
That he has supporters is in no doubt. Three years ago he was pictured enjoying a jovial lunch in London with his erstwhile co-presenters, Anthea Turner and Diane-Louise Jordan; Fern Britton has spoken in his defence; Yvette Fielding, another fellow former Blue Peter presenter, has said she considered Leslie ‘a brother’ and ‘incredibly gentlemanly’.
In Praia da Luz, his expat pals greet him with warm hugs. He’s well-liked, can watch the football and mix his tunes unhindered.
Back before it all went wrong, Leslie once mused on his work life balance. ‘I have a life,’ he said. ‘I don’t live and breathe television. It’s a great job, a great career, but if it finishes tomorrow, I will go and do something else.
‘I think that’s a healthy attitude to have because if it’s all you live for, that’s very scary.’
Words, perhaps, that as sunset tunes play on the shores of Praia da Luz, he still reflects on.
