Why has Melvyn finally left his wife for his mistress?
For 43 years she turned a blind eye to the broadcaster’s dalliances. So . . .
LEADING a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, Melvyn Bragg was in his element, exuding love and devotion towards his wife of more than four decades, the author Cate Haste.
It was her 70th birthday and Haste was surrounded by the warmth and enthusiasm of 50 friends and family members at a celebratory dinner, which had been arranged by her writer and broadcaster husband at their country house in Buckinghamshire.
When Bragg rose to propose a birthday toast, their eyes met.
Among friends listening to his words, full of affection and admiration for the woman he married after his first wife took her own life, were author Robert Harris, Bragg’s fellow Labour peer and former No10 advisor Lord Donoughue, and Jeremy Paxman’s partner, the television producer Elizabeth Clough.
‘Melvyn was in great form, fulsome in his praise for Cate and how great she was,’ says one guest. ‘There were lots of “hear, hears”.’
Nine months later, that joyful Sunday evening must seem to Ms Haste like a dream that never really happened. For the couple are no longer together. Last week, Bragg, 76, confirmed to the Mail that he and Ms Haste, who have two grown-up children, have separated after 43 years, just after they had become grandparents for the first time.
The millionaire socialist has left the €11million family house in Hampstead, north London, where they have been for ten years. He is now living with the woman who has been his on-off mistress for at least 21 years, in her modest end-of-terrace house in less-well-heeled Battersea.
In the tired, cliched way of so many others down the ages, Bragg has left his wife for a younger woman – but not that much younger. For divorcee Gabriel ‘Gaby’ Clare-Hunt, petite and dark-haired, is 60.
SHE was married to prep school headmaster Peter Clare-Hunt, 63, and briefly worked as a secretary at London Weekend Television in the early Nineties, when Bragg was arts controller and presenter of the long-running culture programme The South Bank Show.
As far as some of Haste’s friends are concerned, the end of her marriage to Bragg has been a long time coming.
One of them declares: ‘There’s hardly been a moment when Melvyn hasn’t had another woman in his life. Cate has put up with it because she didn’t want to lose him.
‘She has always loved him, despite everything, and frankly she’s enjoyed the glamorous life that being married to Lord Bragg has given her. She’s done her best to turn a blind eye to his philandering for years.’
Decades, actually – from as long ago as 1980, when he and Haste, a determined but decidedly unshowy woman, had been married for seven years and had two small children. Alice, now a film-maker, was two years old, and Tom, a science writer, not yet one.
That was when Bragg began an affair with slim, glamorous Lady Jane Wellesley, the daughter of the Duke of Wellington and former love interest of the Prince of Wales. They had met at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
The intense affair, widely gossiped about in London, went on for eight years. Eventually, Lady Jane, who is now 64 and remains unmarried, broke it off. Friends said she had finally accepted that ‘Melvyn would never leave his young family’.
Poignantly, it was as Bragg and Lady Jane were ending their affair that Cate Haste began working on her book about sexual mores in Britain in the 20th Century: Rules Of Desire, a learned, rather academic work which tackled ‘the declining ideal of marriage and the new emphasis on relationships’.
More recently she has collaborated with Cherie Blair on a book about prime ministers’ spouses called The Goldfish Bowl.
Bragg and Haste rekindled their relationship, and it was assumed by friends that, both having reached their 70s, they would see out the end of their days together.
This even though the adenoidal broadcaster continues to attract gossip about women, who swoon over his luxuriantly coiffed hair despite his being just four months short of his 77th birthday.
‘Melvyn has never been without women,’ says one old friend.
‘I remember chasing a woman in New York when we were young and he was after her, too. She dropped everything – and I mean everything – and went off round America with him.’
Friends first suspected something might be amiss with the Bragg marriage late last year, when the couple didn’t host their traditional Christmas party.
Over the years the occasion has brought together London’s luvvies, lefties and literati, including bestselling author Ken Follett and his ex-Labour MP wife Barbara, the late Labour leader Michael Foot, the late Rumpole creator John Mortimer and filmmaker David Puttnam.
There was further evidence of marital problems three weeks ago, when Bragg hosted the annual South Bank Sky Arts Awards at the Savoy hotel. He’s done it for years and Ms Haste has always been on the top table with him. This year she was nowhere to be seen.
Then there was another clue, which went almost unnoticed. Bragg was out with Gaby Clare-Hunt recently – his routine had been to spend the weeknights with Haste in Hampstead, and the weekends with Clare-Hunt in Battersea – when they bumped into some old friends.
They were surprised to see that his famously languorous hair had been cut shorter – ‘so we wondered if something was up’.
So begins yet another chapter in the extraordinary love-life of the factory machinist’s son, whose intellect and luvvie charms have taken him from Wigton, Cumbria, in the far reaches of northwest England, via Wadham College, Oxford, to being ennobled by Tony Blair, and included on the guest list – with Ms Haste, naturally – of the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla in 2005.
Clare-Hunt, who has no children, has certainly been patient over these past two decades – their relationship has been far from constant.
According to one of Bragg’s close friends: ‘He broke it off and didn’t see her for a number of years. He wanted to give his marriage another go. But Gaby is an attractive woman and, presumably, she managed to keep Melvyn interested.’
His friends certainly like her and some think her interest in country pursuits persuaded him to campaign – even as a Labour peer – against Tony Blair’s ban on fox-hunting.
He claims he wanted to protect the interests of the farming community. There is certainly no evidence that she gave Lord Bragg any kind of ultimatum.
But the lengthy relationship has not been without criticism.
When Gaby moved from her job at London Weekend Television to become a production assistant for Lord (Richard) Attenborough, the late actor is said to have been displeased that she was involved with a married man.
Just when the affair began is not clear, but it wasn’t long before Bragg was ‘besotted’ with her.
At the time, this was perceived as ‘typical Melvyn behaviour’. ‘No one dreamed that two decades down the line he would be leaving Cate, and that he and Gaby would be living together,’ says one close figure.
‘Melvyn is quite an emotional chap, really. He is very aware of how much he owes Cate – he could never forget it. He must be feeling a great deal of guilt and pain. Perhaps she finally had enough and gave him an ultimatum – her or me. So sad for her.’
THE debt Bragg owes to Ms Haste – who like him is not from a privileged background – goes back to the suicide of his first wife Lise, which left their sixyear-old daughter Marie-Elsa motherless.
‘I couldn’t have gone through those early years without Cate,’ he has said. ‘She helped me bring up Marie-Elsa and to bring some normality into our lives.’
The working-class lad from Cumbria was at Oxford when he met the French aristocrat Marie-Elisabeth Roche (Lise to her friends), a writer and painter who was three years his senior.
They married in 1961, and four years later Marie-Elsa – who is now the Reverend Bragg, a Church of England chaplain at Westminster Abbey – was born.
When she was four, and Bragg’s media career was taking off, he moved out of the family home in Kew, west London. A year later he was back, but it didn’t last. And when they separated again, he began his relationship with Haste.
The first Mrs Bragg suffered what her daughter has described as ‘an enormous and very destructive heartbreak with my father’ and killed herself when Marie-Elsa was six. The Rev. Bragg has described her father as ‘a tortured man’.
In a BBC Two documentary profile marking Bragg’s 75th birthday in 2014, Bragg admitted that Lise’s death had cast ‘a long shadow’ over his otherwise successful life.
He said it was something he ‘can’t get over’. The programme never mentioned any mistresses.
The profile gave Haste the opportunity to give her own birthday tribute, with admiring words about the man she married in 1973, when she was 27 – the man who has now left her. Would she give such a tribute today? Many people know the answer to that.