Tana Ramsay's right: It's not worth ending a marriage over a husband's infidelity (2023)

Tana Ramsay's right: It's not worth ending a marriage over a husband's infidelity

It's a view that will enrage many women. But a betrayed wife who bitterly regrets kicking out her husband says Tana would be wrong to ditch her celebrity chef hubby Gordon Ramsay

By Rachel Royce
Updated: 11:44 EST, 1 December 2008

There are some moments in life when the foggy confusion of everyday existence seems to clear and for a fleeting moment you can glimpse your thoughts in bright perspective.

My latest moment came as I was wandering around the polished aisles of Waitrose in Marlborough this week, covered from head to foot in Afghan desert dust.

I had just stepped off a plane from Kandahar, having spent the week in the war zone as part of my job as a reporter for ITV.

I had fearlessly (or actually somewhat fearfully) survived bullets, improvised explosive devices, bumpy rides in the back of Snatch Land Rovers, ice cold showers, Army rations and the Taliban - only to arrive back in Britain and realise there was no one at home to cook my supper, still less to soothe my tattered nerves.

Rachel Royce (L) says she knows from experience that Tana Ramsay (R) is correct to stick by her husband, celebrity chef Gordon, despite claims he has been philandering

I am divorced. And sometimes that cruel reality sneaks up when I least expect it, just as it did in the supermarket this week.

'Do you want cash back?' the friendly cashier demanded.

No, I thought, I just want my old life back. I have been divorced for over two years, though I separated from my husband, Rod Liddle, four-and-a-half years ago.

As regular readers of this paper may recall, I had discovered he was having an affair with his office receptionist at the Spectator magazine. At the time, I was absolutely livid. I kicked him out of our home and our marriage never recovered. But now? Now, I just feel a fool for having allowed the affair to destroy my life.

Why didn't I just turn a blind eye to his infidelity? If the extent of his unfaithfulness was a fumble with the office tart, who was the real victim? Was it me, who got to keep the otherwise enviable perks as the wife of a successful man; or was it the mistress, who was treated like the proverbial piece of meat and would doubtless be binned the moment she passed her thrill-by date?

I was too proud, and it cost me

Looking back, I should have been better prepared for the decision I would have to make. There had been a previous encounter, you see. Rod and I had been together for 12 years and he'd already had one affair with a blonde bombshell from his office at the BBC.

He spent most of the week with her in London, pretending to me that early starts meant he couldn't come home to Wiltshire except for flying visits at weekends. When I found out about that affair, I decided to forgive him - after all, he wrote me amazing love letters, promised it wouldn't happen again and even proposed to me on one knee during a thunderstorm in Malaysia.

We went ahead with our lavish wedding.

Then, to my deepest humiliation, it happened again. He began another affair, this time with a stick-thin 22-year-old just as we were getting married. I was left alone on our honeymoon with the children while he flew home to see the new mistress.

I suspected what was going on, of course, and it hurt. A lot. But why, in the months that followed, did I have to press for the truth?

Why did I go to the bother of hiring and firing useless detective agencies to track his movements? Why did I put myself through the stress of sneaking out of bed in the night to check his text messages? Why did I have to rifle through his pockets and find the restaurant receipts and empty Viagra packets that confirmed everything I dreaded?

Why, oh why, couldn't I have just let sleeping dogs lie and let him get on with his tawdry after-work rendezvous in hotel rooms, so long as we still had some semblance of a marriage?

I have been torturing myself with these questions this week because Gordon Ramsay's alleged affair with a woman with the morals of an Amsterdam alley cat has brought my own situation into sharp relief.

Gordon's wife, Tana, is far too sensible to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. She probably knows if her husband has had an affair - or indeed a string of them - and yet she is standing by her man, posing in a traditional show of unity with Gordon outside their £3million Victorian pile by Wandsworth Common and almost managing a smile.

Some have labelled her a doormat, a 'mousewife' who is allowing her apparently errant husband to walk all over her. Me? I say the girl's got brains and more cojones than a Spanish butcher's slab. Why would she want to break up her marriage for the sake of some slapper from south Wales?

Think about it: she is married to one of the sexiest men in Britain, he earns millions of pounds a year, they could probably hire a Caribbean island for their family holidays if they wanted to and they have four beautiful children together.

I was left with more worries than I thought possible

It's not just the money, it's the lifestyle that goes with it. Gordon is feted wherever he goes and no swanky party in Britain would be complete without him. The Ramsays were at newsreader Kirsty Young's 40th birthday party at a posh hotel in Somerset the very morning the story of his affair broke - the staff obligingly scuttled around hiding the Sunday papers.

If Tana were to dump Gordon, she would be tolerated at those parties for precisely a year afterwards - then the invitations would dry up.

Gordon would soon be back on the party circuit with wife number two in tow, everyone would marvel about how beautiful and glamorous the new, much younger wife was, and Tana would be left sipping lukewarm Chardonnay at home alone and wondering where her lifestyle had vanished to.

I know all this, because it happened to me. As Rod's partner I used to be invited to glamorous parties with newsreaders, politicians, comedians, chat-show hosts, newspaper owners, authors, lords and ladies and women who'd once slept with Prince Andrew.

These days, a big night out is a karaoke evening at the Old Bell pub in Warminster. And friends - those mutual friends that we used to see on a regular basis for dinner parties, music nights and holidays - do you suppose they visit me in my three-bedroom draughty terrace house? Or do you think they prefer to go to Rod's nine-bedroom Wiltshire mansion with cottages, grounds and room for 20 Mercedes on the drive?

No competition there then. Still, I don't blame them. He always was a much better cook than me; I'd choose his Moroccan lamb with couscous over my spag bol any time.

The truth is, I gave up my husband through pride and distress, yet I am left with far more anxiety, loneliness and financial worries than I ever dreamt were possible.

Gordon Ramsay with Tana after news broke of his alleged seven-year secret affair with Sarah Symonds

Yes, I got a divorce settlement. But forget all that talk about ex-wives walking away from the divorce courts with the lion's share of their husbands' fortune. There are always a few women who are rich enough in their own right to hire the top-notch lawyers who can secure a bumper payout. But most ex-wives struggle to make ends meet.

I am living on a fraction of what Rod and his mistress (now much younger wife) live on. I am constantly worried about bills, I can no longer afford fancy holidays, and I've even taken in a lodger to help make ends meet. She works shifts and when she is up at 5am, I am woken by creaking floorboards above my head.

To top it all, after returning from Afghanistan this week, I learned I was being made redundant by ITV, another sad statistic of our credit crunch economy.

Throughout all this angst, I continue to look after two little boys by myself. Yes, they are a joy and I love them to bits - but how much more enjoyable was their childhood when an enthusiastic daddy took them to football matches and watched them with pride instead of a mother who never liked football anyway and would much rather be having a lie-in while hubby took care of the boy things in life.

I'm no good at keepy-uppys, I don't know how to play computer games, I can't jam a quick Pink Floyd riff on my son's guitar, however much he might plead me to. And, oh, the guilt - the heavy weight of shame I feel every time I read another newspaper article saying my darling sons are more likely to end up involved in drugs and crime because they have a single mummy rather than a smug married one to take care of them.

It may be taboo to admit it, but how I wish I'd taken a leaf out of the books of those other married women who have swallowed their pride and stood by their philandering husbands and seen their marriages survive.

Going against feminist idealism

Victoria Beckham didn't miss a beat when the papers claimed David had an affair with the aptly named Rebecca Loos - she stuck out her pointy little chin, clung winningly on to his arm and categorically denied that her husband would ever do anything so low.

She fooled no one, of course - least of all herself. But what dividends her strategy has paid! A multi-million-pound contract in Los Angeles for David, a new career in fashion for Posh, and still they are Brand Beckham.

Victoria was not the first to stand by her man, of course - there have been countless examples of women turning a blind eye to their philandering husbands over the centuries. Indeed, it's only relatively recently that anyone has thought it mattered if husbands had affairs at all.

Tudor and Georgian London were simply dripping with prostitutes who gladly took on the physical exertions of the bedroom, while the wives busied themselves with the far more refined pleasures that 'marrying well' afforded them.

It was perhaps only with Queen Victoria and her devoted love of Albert that the notion that husbands and wives must commit themselves to each other exclusively and for ever caught on.

I don't dispute that there may be many millions of couples who willingly and happily remain faithful to one another until their dying days. It is entirely right that we celebrate their achievement and encourage our own children to strive for that kind of enduring relationship.

But what about those marriages that fail to live up to that romantic ideal; that stumble at the fence of human experience; that are burdened by disappointments and compromise? Is it better that they are broken up? Or is a more flexible solution preferable? On reflection, I've come to admire the example set by Jane Clark, wife of the late Tory MP and notorious philanderer Alan Clark. Jane put up with a string of affairs, including the famous fling with the Harkess mother and daughters. (She knew it was pointless trying to make Alan change his ways. And, in the scale of human happiness, her anger at his sexual indiscretions was outweighed by the lifestyle, freedoms and status she was afforded as his wife.)

More recently still, Marina Johnson, wife of London Mayor Boris, made her errant husband sleep on the sofa for . . . ooh, roughly one night after news of his affair with a work colleague broke before it was back to 'business as usual'.

And then there's the marvellous Pauline Prescott, determined not to allow her discovery of John's extramarital activities to interfere with the delivery of a new bathroom suite. Marvellous.

Why go to all that trouble of procuring, netting and landing a fine catch to have someone else run off with the goods?

Oh, I know my view will horrify most British women (though in many continental countries it would be regarded as the norm). Certainly, it goes against every fibre of feminist idealism. If I were to tell it to my wide-eyed and innocent younger self, I, too, would be shocked and appalled.

And, of course, it's true that there are some men whose behaviour is so abhorrent that it is not only right but essential that their wives should leave them and seek a better life elsewhere. But the fact is, most unfaithful men make at least some attempt to keep their affair secret from their wife - indeed, often they continue loving them as before, perhaps more so.

Was Rod one of those men? I'll never know. What I do know is that when I tell my friends I regret kicking him out, they are shocked.

They chide me and remind me of what I have gained. I no longer have to put up with a husband who lies to me, who shouts at me when I question his absences. They tell me: 'At least you don't have to wonder who he is with every night.'

But that's just it: I don't have to wonder because I know where he is - he is with her and not me. And the sad truth is, in my own experience, a philandering husband is better than no husband at all.

Why does no one tell you this? Answer: because just as in Jane Austen's day, women still hanker after marrying some Mr Darcy who will sweep them off their feet for an eternity of mutual adoration.

Well, sometimes, here in the real world, the ending doesn't work out as we hoped.

We never did find out what happened to Elizabeth Bennet after the wedding, but you can bet my redundancy pay cheque she wouldn't have ditched her fine gowns and stately home if she'd caught Darcy fondling the kitchen maid.