Divorced Lord Bragg now free to marry his younger lover
WHEN I disclosed two years ago that Melvyn Bragg had separated from his wife, Cate Haste, the distinguished broadcaster told me they were determined to keep the break-up amicable.
Yesterday, Cate, who wrote a book about 10 Downing Street with Cherie Blair, was granted a ‘quickie’ divorce in a 50-second hearing at the Central London Family Court that brought to an end their 45-year marriage.
‘This means they can both finally move on with their lives,’ one of Lord Bragg’s friends tells me. ‘His girlfriend may well now feels that she deserves to be the next Lady Bragg.’
That girlfriend is former film assistant Gabriel Clare-Hunt, 62, with whom he was first reported to have had an affair more than 20 years ago when she was a secretary at London Weekend Television, where he was arts controller.
In papers submitted by Cate, she said the marriage had ‘broken down irretrievably’ and cited ‘two years’ separation by consent’ as grounds for the divorce.
District Judge Anne Hudd granted a decree nisi, with neither Lord Bragg, 79, who presents Radio 4 discussion programme In Our Time, nor Cate, 73, present.
Last year, I revealed that the Labour peer had agreed a huge financial settlement with his wife, with whom he has two grown-up children, filmmaker Alice and science journalist Tom.
He is understood to have shelled out several million pounds to buy Cate her own home in Hampstead, North London. He also has a daughter, Marie-Elsa, who is a Church of England priest, from his first marriage to Marie-Elisabeth Roche.
Miss Roche, who was known to friends as Lise, killed herself in 1971. In a BBC2 documentary profile marking his 75th birthday in 2014, Bragg admitted that Lise’s death had cast ‘a long shadow’.