She has been described by one of her advisers as a “proper feet-on-the-ground Yorkshire lass”.

But the woman who has set tongues wagging on Tyneside with a potential NUFC takeover bid has far from a normal background.

On Monday, after weeks of speculation, Amanda Staveley and PCP Parners Capital made a former offer for Newcastle United.

The club are yet to confirm official receipt of the offer, which is reported to be £300million.

Born and bred in Yorkshire, Amanda Staveley is the daughter of landowner Robert Staveley, whose North Stainley estate, near Ripon, was a gift to his ancestors from Cardinal Wolsey in 1516.

And the 44-year-old’s impressive business background runs in the family, with maternal grandfather Ralph Raper running a successful chain of betting shops and, later, Doncaster dog racing track.

Her father Robert, meanwhile, was the founder of Lightwater Valley - one of Yorkshire’s biggest tourist attractions.

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The theme park started life as a pig farm on the family’s land, which progressed to become a fruit picking farm in 1969, with Robert and his wife, Lynne, welcoming the public to pick fruit farmed on the estate.

The farm first expanded when Robert opened his piggery operations to the public.

The attraction as it is known today perhaps became most widely known as a theme park after the creation of the Rat Rollercoaster in 1987, which at the time became the world’s first and only subterranean rollercoaster.

The village of North Stainley has been vastly occupied by the Staveley family for centuries. The family has held the 1,400 acre estate since 1516.

The signs at the entrance and exit of the village have the family crest of a stag’s head on them and even the village pub is called The Staveley Arms.

In 1996, Robert Staveley decided to hand Lightwater Valley to his children, Amanda and James. They managed the park until 1997 when Queensborough Holdings bought the site for £5.6m.

As a girl, Amanda attended Queen Margaret’s School in York where she was keen on sport, particularly athletics and equestrian, though a torn Achilles ended her sporting career.

After leaving school at 16 she took her A-levels in a single year before being accepted into Cambridge’s St Catharine’s College to read modern languages.

(Image: PA)

Her degree was never completed though after she quit following the death of her grandfather, who she has previously said taught her everything she knows.

“I was very young. My grandfather died and I was in a very unhappy period,” she said.

Rather than go back to Yorkshire, Amanda began her course towards becoming a multi-millionaire.

She persuaded a bank to loan her £180,000 loan to open the restaurant Stocks between Cambridge and Newmarket.

With no formal training, she “lived and breathed business and banking” both studying for her future roles in the city and working as a waitress.

She also worked as a part-time model for extra cash.

It is here Amanda is said to have build her extensive business network in the Middle East from her restaurant - brushing shoulders with the region’s wealthy horse owners.

One of these was said to be a major investor in her next venture, the Q.ton conference centre on Cambridge Science Park, before being named Businesswoman of the Year in 2000.

But after selling a 49% stake to EuroTelecom, a company which flopped in the collapse of the Dotcom boom, but after buying back her stake in Q.ton in a complicated deal the company failed.

Amanda then moved to the Middle East, and once said in an interview that, “There is something about the growth of this young economy that I saw in myself.”

She now spearheads PCP Capital Partners, an investment firm with extensive connections in the Middle East, and in 2008 was involved in the takeover of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Amanda now splits her time between Dubai and London, with husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi and their son Alexander (Lexi), who was born early after she went into labour in a business meeting.

Before settling down with Ghodoussi she had previously been romantically linked to Prince Andrew, and was rumoured to have turned down a marriage proposal from him.

In 2014 she told the Evening Standard that she had been diagnosed as carrying the gene for Huntington’s disease, a degenerative condition that presents like a cross between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

She told the paper that the devastating diagnosis meant that she is almost certain to develop full-blown Huntington’s disease within 20 years.