Barely five months ago, Eamonn Holmes was playing the victim, saying he was devastated and blindsided after his wife Ruth Langsford announced they were divorcing. And yet in the last few days he’s been snapped on a romantic break in the Med with his new much younger lover Katie Alexander, in one shot tenderly patting her bottom as they head out for a night in Ibiza.
In some of the pictures of them in the sunshine, Katie is wearing a £315 feathered black mini-dress, carrying an £850 Loewe handbag and tottering about in towering £655 Christian Louboutin stilettos. All while those claims that he was the injured party when he and Ruth split are still so fresh in the memory.
I’m sorry, Eamonn, but the game’s up. I’m afraid these pictures will cost you dear – not least in the eyes of the viewing public.
How can a man can go at such speed from a 27-year loving relationship to parading a woman nearly half his age around Ibiza?
It takes a particular kind of cruelty on portly Eamonn’s part to flaunt his young lover when he knows his wife Ruth, also a high-profile celebrity, will see each and every picture.
Eamonn isn’t yet divorced. He’s still married. Just as he was when the curvaceous blonde Yorkshire divorcee mum-of-three contacted him online in 2015, swooning over him saying he was her George Clooney.
He was married when he reportedly began meeting up with Katie regularly after her own marriage ended in 2022. Married when she allegedly stayed at a Surrey hotel just a convenient ten minutes away from where Eamonn and Ruth lived in Weybridge.
And Ruth, understandably, has had enough. Even as Eamonn was triumphantly parading his paramour around Ibiza, with one friend saying gushingly ‘Katie is living her dream’, we learnt that Ruth has enlisted one of the most ferocious divorce lawyers in the country, Catherine Costley.
The £400-an-hour divorce lawyer is renowned as ‘fierce and methodical’. She learned her skills at the knee of her former boss and mentor Baroness Shackleton who acted for the-then Prince Charles in his divorce against Diana and is nicknamed The Steel Magnolia for the charm and determination with which she pursues her quarry.
So ruthlessly effective was she when representing Sir Paul McCartney in his divorce from Heather Mills, his wife of four years, that Mills poured a glass of water over Shackleton’s head in fury after leaving court with a £24million settlement instead of the £125million she was seeking.
There’s little doubt that Ruth’s appointment of Ms Costley, one of the top five divorce lawyers in the country, will rain like a cold shower over Eamonn’s shameless love parade.
Which is nothing less than he deserves. If he had conducted this affair with some kind of dignity and respect for Ruth, kept it quiet and under the media radar, and been honest with her that he’d fallen in love with someone else, it could have been a quiet divorce settled between two people who had been married for 13 years and raised a son together.
But given his recent behaviour, his self-pitying outbursts when they split have a hollow ring.
As for telly tubby Eamonn’s claims he hoped Ruth and he could remain friends, there’s fat chance of that. I can’t even begin to imagine Ruth’s rage – and it will soon have Eamonn quaking in his electric wheelchair.
On behalf of betrayed women everywhere, I hope Ruth Langsford takes her duplicitous husband to the cleaners
Ms Costley advises women seeking or anticipating a divorce that they have to protect themselves and their finances, and should have a secret fund of their own money in case they need to exit a relationship quickly.
‘My main piece of advice,’ she says, ‘would be that everyone should have a “go bag”. It doesn’t matter how much or how little money you have, make sure you always [have]… savings of your own’.
Which adds another layer of intrigue to the Holmes v Langsford divorce.
Did Ruth see it coming? Was she keeping her powder dry before making the shock announcement of their split until she’d got her ‘go bag’ in place?
I only ask as figures released in February this year for her company Hey Ho Ltd reveal she made £2.3million last year through her work on TV including Loose Women and her lucrative shopping channel show, Ruth Langsford Fashion on QVC.
While Eamonn’s salary from GB News is thought to be around £1million, there probably aren’t a lot more big bucks payday TV offers out there for him.
It is reported that Eamonn is so besotted he has lavished Katie and her children with expensive gifts, which might explain the £4,200 Alhambra bracelet she was wearing in those Ibiza snaps. After all, on her modest income as a relationship counsellor at £45 for a 50-minute session, she probably isn’t paying. Now she’s driving a £50,000 Mercedes.
The point is that Eamonn knows what he’s doing, showing off his new love in this way. He has been a TV star for decades. He knows about publicity. After Ruth chucked him out, he knew he would a person of interest wherever he went.
He well knew when he embarked with Katie on his luxury cruise on the Scarlet Lady (yes, really!) that every move he made would be snapped by fellow cruisers and that the couple would be photographed together in public places.
My question is how could he do that to Ruth, who stood by him for years though his constant illnesses: a double hip replacement, back surgery, then a fall down the stairs of the home they shared after which he could not even walk.
On behalf of betrayed women everywhere, I hope Ruth takes her duplicitous husband to the cleaners. And that through the skills of her fearsome divorce lawyer she leaves him high and dry.
And let’s see then how irresistible the adoring Katie finds her crocked and financially diminished 64-year-old sugar daddy.
