He went from covering crimes as a journalist to solving them as a police officer. At first, the name Ned Donovan may not be familiar, but if you dig into his family tree, his maternal grandparents were Hollywood actress Patricia Neal (Hud, Breakfast at Tiffany's) and author Roald Dahl (Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
His mother is Tessa Dahl, who was also an actress and has been a renowned author for years, and his father, Patrick Donovan, was an Australian businessman who passed away five years ago and was the son of Ambassador Francis Patrick Donovan. The most surprising fact about Ned's parents is that they were only married for a few months in 1992.
Ned was born and raised in London but always maintained his connection to the United States, as his legendary grandmother lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The young man made headlines because, as reported exclusively by the Daily Mail, he married last week to Megan Tomlin, an attractive and unknown American TikTok star at St Margaret's Church in Babington, in the English county of Somerset.
Among the guests were his stepsister, model Sophie Dahl, who is married to singer Jamie Cullum, and his godfather, Sir Nicholas Coleridge, president of the King's Foundation.
The interest of the news lies not only in the wedding but in who he divorced from, as it is Princess Raiyah of Jordan, the youngest daughter of Queen Noor and King Hussein of Jordan. Therefore, she is the half-sister of King Abdullah II of Jordan. The couple married in July 2020 in England amidst the health crisis due to Covid, resulting in a very limited number of attendees.
As the princess stated in a statement issued by the Hashemite royal house, "although originally planned for April in Jordan, the pandemic derailed those plans and it was safer for my husband's family to celebrate it in the UK."
Until their engagement was announced in 2019, Ned had worked for seven years as a freelance journalist for The Times and Mail on Sunday, eventually becoming a correspondent for the latter in Southeast Asia based in Delhi, India. He had previously abandoned his archaeology studies.
In the same year of his marriage, he completed an intensive course in Modern Standard Arabic which "taught me two things: that my Arabic is not very good and that I will continue to try to improve it," he wrote on his social media. His ex-wife holds a master's degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University in New York, a master's degree in Japanese studies from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and at that time was pursuing a Ph.D. in premodern Japanese literature at the University of California, UCLA.
Also, in 2020, Ned decided to change his professional path to become a police officer. He first served in the Metropolitan Police in London and, according to his LinkedIn profile, was part of a London patrol that was the first to arrive at the scene of various types of crimes such as sexual assaults, domestic violence, robbery, public disorder, child protection, etc. He then worked on locating suspects who would be brought before the courts.
In 2023, he had the second-highest number of arrests in London among officers of his rank. He has public order training, and among the most notable events he has been involved in are Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, the state funeral of the monarch, and the Notting Hill Carnival.
The cause of Ned and Princess Raiyah of Jordan's divorce is currently unknown, but it is known that they did not have any children.
Currently, Ned and Megan reside in the state of South Carolina in the United States, where since March 2025, he has been working in the island community of Isle of Palms.
In statements to ABC News, Ned Donovan stated that "policing and journalism have quite significant similarities such as talking to people who don't want to talk to you, trying to find out things, knocking on doors, and visiting places at any time of day (...)."