Only two journalists have ever won a ‘Winston’ award. One was Quentin Letts, a talented columnist, and author of a number of celebrated books. The other was Peter Lloyd, a journalist with Mail Online. His recently-published book Stand By Your Manhood received very favourable reviews.
Peter deserves a second award for his blinding contribution to a piece on Radio 4 yesterday, about spousal maintenance. A judge had very reasonably ordered an ex-wife to get a job rather than rely on her ex-husband’s income for life.
Peter made the (female) divorce lawyer sound like a blithering idiot. Her use of the word ‘equality’ will make you laugh out loud, or kick the cat. But one of Peter’s sentences above all stood out for us:
A man needs marriage like a fish needs a bicycle.
Priceless.
He was very good, wasn’t he.
PS: My former sister in law cleaned out my brother, who had sorted his affairs so that he could retire at fifty with a good income and no mortgage, and squandered her considerable share of the proceeds of the marriage, more than £100k, in less than twelve months, without providing herself with a home. Stupidly, he has since acquired another female liability and is now mortgaged until the age of seventy five, I believe. Various Chancellors have effectively destroyed his pension, the money taken going disproportionately to women of course.
My own experience is rather unusual in that my first wife left me when I had lost everything and made no claim at all for any subsequent payments for maintenance or child support, despite her solicitor’s urging to demand the absolute minimum in order to establish the principle. It was years later that I realised the reason was probably that she had been stealing from me for years and did not want her finances examined. That belated realisation came partly thanks to some inadvertent remarks from my daughter about her mother’s secret accounts and the sums in them, unknown to her then current boyfriend, partly from newly remembered incidents and activities involving questionable payments and withdrawals and partly from remembering that I could never understand why we were always short of money, despite my being in the top 5% income bracket.
My second wife is a paragon of virtue and loving devotion – I really am a very fortunate man – but she is frighteningly financially incompetent and largely to blame for our present reduced circumstances.
The lesson I’ve learned in my fifty nine years is that women and money are like petroleum spirit and a naked flame.
The woman in this case didn’t want ‘equality’ at all, she wanted both continuity and superiority: continuity of lifestyle in the sense that she would continue to enjoy the lifestyle she had when married and superiority of lifestyle in that she would enjoy a life of leisure while her husband had to continue to support her by his labour.
Not on.
typical female guliting and lying. How is living off a man, helping him build his career? This is females just claiming that men owe them an obligation when in fact it is men who support women.
I don’t even believe in spliting the assets 50/50 after marrage, the wage earner should keep the house, the Chinese have made that the law when it comes to divorce.
Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
It was interesting that the Lawyer kept repeating that equality meant parity of lifestyle after the divorce and splitting of assets. This parity would of course be possible should the spouse go to work and work hard. Again this “equality” relies on the earning of the husband. In this case the husband argued successfully that his income would fall when he retired. So the “equality” the lawyer referred to could only be maintained at the same level if the husband was forced not to retire. A very clear case of a “right” only being possible on the income of another person. Scotland was referred to and many other countries do not have this presumption of continuing to be “kept in the style accustomed”. London is the divorce capital precisely because it has unusually generous attitudes to ex-wives. I recall a case where a woman who had squandered a considerable fortune following a divorce and determined to not to work , returned for a second “bite of the cherry” . It took a long fight yet clearly in any sensible jurisdiction coming back years later would have been stopped in the preliminaries.
Peter Lloyd, you are composed, you are forthright, you are polite, you are knowledgeable, you are brilliant. You are much needed and I want to hear more of you on the radio. Please sort 🙂