Woe is me & Ms Jones - Chronicle of a divorce foretold

She is Liz Jones, the uptight, neurotic former editor of Marie Claire, whose fame is down to her über-confessional musings about her younger, feckless, selfish, serially unfaithful husband.

He is Nirpal Dhaliwal, 11 years her junior, a man who even on their wedding day - a £20,000 gig at Babington House paid for by the bride - preferred to get drunk with his mates. Together, they are Britain's most talked-about media couple, locked in mutual loathing as their diatribes against each other both enthral and repulse the readers of their columns. It is an arrangement that has been financially beneficial to both.

Now, though, this fairy tale is at an end. After seven years together the pair have finally split.

She has booted him out of the Islington marital home, and served him with divorce papers. The reason? His adultery, of course.

"Yes, he has been pretty shit," Ms Jones, 44, said this week. "We are going through with the divorce. I think my readers will be relieved. The little fur babies - no, he's not going to take them with him, they voted to stay with Mummy. He was a very good cat-monitor, let's just say that."

This is a typically Jonesesque reference to the mercifully childless couple's cats, the one aspect of their life together that they both seemed to enjoy.

Mr Dhaliwal was unusually reluctant to discuss the break-up, notwithstanding his wife's verbal swipes. "Nice try, but I won't be changing my mind," he said. "I'd rather not do an interview right now, it's just a bit too soon." His column in the Evening Standard revealed they broke up while on holiday earlier this month.

He wrote a couple of years ago about how the couple were reunited after one of his numerous extra-marital forays.

"My wife threw me out after discovering I've been cheating on her. On the night we got back together, I made strong, passionate love to her. I needed to keep a sense of self and not allow her to mire me in guilt. At the height of passion, I asked her, 'Who's the boss?' The question threw her. Initially, she wouldn't give me a reply, but I enticed it from her. 'You are,' she finally gasped. 'You are!'"

The couple met in 2000 when Ms Jones was editor of Marie Claire and married three years later. But if ever there were two people with more spectacularly different views on sex, relationships and household chores, they have yet to be found.

He was so unhappy at being married to her that his weight ballooned to 17 stone, yet supposed her friends must be jealous because she had such a handsome spouse. She hated having to pay for everything, that he could never keep anything tidy, and never bought her a present, even on her birthday.

Ms Jones wrote about all this in columns for three newspapers, and secured a six-figure salary as a fashion writer on the back of her confessional. She also managed a book.

He was out of work at first, but was given his break to respond to her constant carpings with a newspaper column and also became a novelist.

So what was the fascination? Oliver James, a psychologist and author of Britain on the Couch, said the couple's columns revealed a type of "demented control-freakery" in both of them. He argued: "It is a form of exhibitionism and we all read it because we are interested in the ups and downs of any relationship, particularly the downs, because it is a way of avoiding our own problems."