Pointless torment of Tini, the ‘locked in’ wife, shames us ALL

EVERY time I think of Hugh Owens, the mushroom magnate who keeps denying his wife, Tini, a divorce, I think of those men who keep women entombed in hidey-holes in dank basements. Like them, Mr Owens is using all his fading power to keep a woman from breathing the sweet air of the freedom she craves.

Instead of relying on actual imprisonment, though, Owens is engaged in an extraordinary effort to prevent the woman who has already left him emotionally and physically from leaving him contractually, too. And his repeated success in this crazed aim proves beyond doubt that the law when it comes to the state of our unions is old and rotten. But first, to recap.

Last week, three Appeal Court justices upheld the verdict of a judge that even though Mrs Owens was ‘trapped in a loveless and desperately unhappy marriage’, sorry, Madam: this was not grounds for divorce.

What we can take away from this is sobering. Mr Owens’s shocking treatment of his spouse is enabled by outdated statute.

While her grounds for claiming unreasonable behaviour lacked ‘beef’ and were ‘anodyne’, the judges ruled, her 78-year-old husband’s contention that the couple – who have been married for four decades – ‘still had a few years left to enjoy’ together mystifyingly held water. The upshot of two court cases is that Mrs Owens, 66, must remain ‘the locked-in wife’.

Leaving aside the Owenses for a sec, what all this reveals is that there are three of us in all our marriages: husband, wife, and the State. You can’t marry without the permission of the State – and you can’t divorce without the permission of the State. This reach into our personal lives would be OK if our laws kept pace with change.

In my lifetime, we’ve had civil partnerships, we’ve had gay marriage, we’ve had an app called Splitsville, and ‘divorce hotels’ in the US, where married couples can check in on Friday and leave on Sunday massaged, pampered and divorced. Yet we don’t have modern family laws at all – nothing has changed since the Divorce Reform Act of 1969.

If we want to divorce, we still have to blame our spouse, and prove ‘fault’. This isn’t just bad for the Mrs Owens of the world, whose other halves ‘contest’ the divorce and demand that wedlock means padlock (last year there were 113,996 petitions for divorce, of which 2,600 were contested).

It’s also bad for cohabiting, unmarried couples, the fastestgrowing type of family in the UK, who have scant legal rights at all.

The lead justice, to his credit, knew this was wrong, and, in his judgment, almost begged Mr Owens ‘to reconsider his position’ and relent and consent to a divorce as his wife was in a ‘very unhappy situation’.

AND I do hope that he does. For until that moment, Mrs Owens is like a bug that’s crawled into those vermincontrol boxes you get in America called Roach Motels. She checked in, but she can’t check out – not until 2020, when the couple will have been separated for the full five years demanded by law. Only then can she walk free.

The justice also defended himself by saying he didn’t write the law, he applied it, and hospitalpassed responsibility for the whole mess to MPs. He said Parliament must hurry up and bring in nofault, divorce-on-demand soon.

Well, as it happened, Parliament had the chance to do just that last month but MPs swerved, on the grounds that making divorce any easier is a hot political potato. Which is not cool.

We can’t call ourselves a civilised country – as so many did last week – and have such awful divorce laws that oppress some, neglect others and shame us all.