A successful man trades in a dutiful wife of 30 years for a younger woman, and the abandoned wife is faced with having the beautiful house — where they raised four children over 25 years — sold from under her.
It is the kind of big money divorce on which Sir Nicholas ‘Mr Payout’ Mostyn made his name. And who better than the brilliant QC, now an eminent family courts judge, to find a way through this emotional and perilous minefield when the acrimonious case reaches the courts?
But for one thing: Mr Justice Mostyn is the husband in question, and it is his own wife Lucy who, according to family friends, is desperate not to lose The Danes, their Grade II-listed 18th century manor house in the Hertfordshire countryside, valued at more than £6.5 million.
‘Lucy made it what it is,’ says one of them — ‘the furnishings, the garden, the stabling where she rents out accommodation and provides hay for horses owned by City people who like to ride at weekends.
'She’s put her whole heart and soul into it, and she loves it there. Why should she have to give it all up just because Nick no longer lives at home?’
Last November, seven months after being appointed a High Court judge, Sir Nicholas, 54, startled the legal world when it emerged that he had left his 53-year-old wife and had set up home with fellow barrister Elizabeth Saunders, who also specialises in family and divorce settlement issues.