Even the beautiful people’s marriages can turn ugly

They seemed the couple who had it all. But the increasingly messy revelations of life chez Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi show it was a recipe for disaster.

She brought beauty, talent and fame as a domestic goddess to the table. He has huge wealth, intelligence and a successful career but it wasn’t enough.

Last week in the fraud trial against two of the assistants who worked for the couple, there were claims that Nigella has a serious cocaine habit which she was hiding from her husband.

There was “a culture of secrecy” in their marriage it was stated. Mr Saatchi was paying household bills of £100,000 a month on his credit card and he now believes some of that was spent on drugs.

So the relationship which ended after he was pictured apparently trying to choke her in a restaurant doesn’t exactly sound like a marriage made in heaven, does it?

Divorce has a habit of bringing out the worst in people and the mudslinging can get nasty but Nigella and Charles take the biscuit.

For years they’ve seemed like the golden couple. A fabulous London home where she claimed they often spent the evening in bed together, talking over their day, watching TV and eating plates of food she’d made.

He was, she gushed in the early days: “A wonderful lover, a fabulously amusing and intelligent man.”

She was the “perfect woman” in bed and in the kitchen, he enthused.

So far, so sick-making for all of us who read this kind of thing in celeb magazines and feel just a tad inferior as we zap a microwave ready meal, nag the kids to get their homework done, snap at our husband for forgetting to put the bins out, cringe with guilt when we admit at bedtime to one child that we didn’t buy the prezzy at lunchtime which she needs for her friend’s party tomorrow before collapsing on the sofa to watch TV, feeling frazzled and feeble.

If only we could live like the beautiful people . . .

But the dream lifestyle of rich and successful couples is subject to its own pressures.

Money, beauty, fame and success don’t insure us against human weakness, selfishness, bad choices, lack of understanding and the slow death of love in a relationship.

We know when life is working well within our family. We don’t need to think about it because it feels good, it feels safe.

But when a relationship is in trouble it can bring out the best or the worst in people. No-one really knows the truth of what goes on between a husband and wife who are tearing each other apart.

The devastating and destructive end of Nigella and Charles’s marriage is proof of that.

And one thing is certain, no-one could possibly envy this couple their luxury lifestyle now.