For the past four months Kamiti maximum security prison has been home to the Honourable Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley, heir to the fifth Lord Delamere, as he awaits trial for murder after shooting a poacher on his family’s 56,000-acre estate.

Visitors to the prison are shocked by his skeletal figure as he survives on a diet of maize porridge and spinach.

When Cholmondeley goes on trial tomorrow, it will be the second time in little more than a year that the Old Etonian has faced the death penalty for murder.

The case has split Kenya along racial lines and excited lurid headlines. Politicians have accused the Delamere family, regarded as Kenya’s most famous white settlers, of acting with arrogance and impunity on their ranch two hours’ drive north of Nairobi.

But this weekend Cholmondeley’s girlfriend, Sally Dudmesh, denounced the portrayal of the 38-year-old aristocrat as a trigger-happy racist toff.

“He’s been brought up as an African. He was an only child and grew up playing with African children,” she said. “He’s not a redneck white Kenyan.”

Many ordinary Kenyans have little sympathy for Cholmondeley. He was arrested in April last year after killing Samson ole Sisina, who was leading an undercover investigation into the illegal bushmeat trade.

He claimed he was acting in self-defence, believing he had stumbled upon an armed robbery on his land. The charges were dropped.

The Masai community mounted demonstrations around the Delamere property. The roads were blocked again last May when Cholmondeley was arrested for killing a second man.

He claims he stumbled across Robert Njoya among a group of poachers and shot him by accident while trying to kill the poachers’ dogs.

That explanation is dismissed by Njoya’s family and others who claim to have been beaten by farm workers for gathering wood on Delamere land.

Some report being “dive-bombed” by crop-spraying planes during a dispute over squatting rights.

“Tom’s almost become a Christ figure, a sacrificial lamb,” said one friend. “All the problems of this country are being blamed on him and the white population.”

Although he faces a death sentence if convicted, in reality such prisoners are condemned to life in jail.

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