News that John Cleese has successfully halved his £1.3 million annual divorce settlement has surely come as a relief to the Monty Python star, who had complained bitterly that at the age of 69 he would be required to continue working in order to pay maintenance to his third wife, a situation he unflinchingly described as "feeding the beast".
Cleese will still have to pay £650,000 a year to American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger, 64, to whom he was married for 15 years, but the fact that a US judge agreed that the original amount was excessive in the current recession, after the value of the star's extensive property portfolio had dropped, is a hugely significant sign of the times.
On this side of the Atlantic, lawyers have already warned women that they face being forced to accept reduced pay-outs from high-earning men who are seeking to have their divorce terms revisited because of a rapid decline in their earning power.
The divorce courts – never happy places at the best of times – have become the setting for extraordinary scenes of financial wrangling, as former husbands battle to have settlements and maintenance payments slashed in line with shrinking bonuses.
"I recently had a two-hour meeting with a client who was sounding me out about the cost and likely outcome of his divorce – which house would his wife get, how big a lump sum would he have to hand over and so on," says Tom Amlot, head of family law at the London firm Harbottle & Lewis.
"At the end of the discussion he stood up and didn't say a word, so I asked him whether he was going to stay or leave the marriage. He replied that he needed to study the figures in more detail and he was going to run it through his spreadsheet that evening and then make a decision.
"Even to a cynical lawyer like me it was genuinely shocking that someone would conduct their personal life via a spreadsheet."
Businessmen who once shrugged off a six or seven-figure settlement to their ex-wives are now claiming poverty. In recent days a number of high-profile cases have made headlines.
Fund manager Brian Myerson told the Court of Appeal that his £14 million post-divorce fortune had been wiped out and so he could no longer afford the £9.5 million he owed to Ingrid, his former wife. The couple, who were married in December 1982 and had a daughter and two sons, were divorced in February 2008. Myerson, 50, was ordered to pay his sculptress wife a lump sum of £7 million and £2.5 million over four years.
Mrs Myerson, 48, received 43 per cent of the couple's assets – which were worth £25.8 million – including their £1.5 million South African home. Almost all of her husband's 57 per cent was tied up in shares in his investment company – the value of which has plunged so dramatically that his £14.6 million fortune would now apparently be £500,000 in the red if he complied with the divorce order.
When the High Court in London was told that Myerson possessed minus five per cent of the couple's assets while Mrs Myerson owned the equivalent of 105 per cent, a titter broke out and Lord Justice Thorpe was prompted to remark, in fabulously Rumpole fashion, that the situation was "a rum do".
Myerson is represented by London's leading divorce lawyer, Raymond Tooth, a man not exactly noted for his hearts and flowers approach to marriage guidance.
"Wives would be better now to wait, as the courts are being very wary about awards because of the problem of the ability to make payments," he says, bluntly. "Can you put up with it for two years? Unless it's intolerable, I should hold on. It's the most important financial transaction you'll ever make: get it right."
His advice to husbands is strikingly different: "Move on now while your star is low in the sky. You can escape with less."
Cash-strapped Jim Moore (he says he is down to his last £3 million) wants the court to overturn the "harsh" terms of his divorce settlement, obliging him to pay his former wife £4.7 million over the next three years.
At the time of the divorce, Moore (once known as the Buy-to-let King) had a property investment empire worth a robust £135 million. Now, he claims to be so down on his uppers that he's representing himself in court, although he still lives in Switzerland for tax reasons.
It's hard to feel much sympathy when the jet-set complain of feeling fleeced, but Sandra Davis, head of family law at Mishcon de Reya, points out that when the super-rich sneeze, the rest of us will, eventually, catch cold.
"The City felt the pinch six months or so before the rest of the population. The increased trend in relationship breakdown that sector felt is now repeating itself across the rest of society," says Davis. "The average couple will also have found that the relative value of their assets has fallen in the same way as the high fliers."
Davis predicts that estranged couples will take a hard look at their finances and wonder how they can maintain two households from a static or reducing income.
The reason these cases have attracted such interest lies in the fact that the husbands are seeking to have lump sum payments, even if staggered, reduced. It's common for individuals to apply for
changes to maintenance payments as a result of fluctuations in income, and there has been a huge rise in City workers doing just that. But the alteration of a capital settlement has enormous implications.
"It would be a dangerous precedent because it would mean that anyone would be able to reopen a settlement," says divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd-Platt. "If a husband takes a gamble and decides to give his wife the liquid assets while he keeps the shares, because he reckons they will be worth more, should the wife really be penalised because he made the wrong choice?"
But it's not only husbands who are calculating which way the financial wind blows. Many shrewd wives are doing their sums.
"Some women are deciding to bale out as soon as they can, before their husbands lose their jobs, and they find their home is at risk," says Lloyd-Platt. "Other, very wealthy women are hanging fire because they are determined to wait until things improve economically rather than cutting loose when their joint assets are at their lowest."
Sitting tight until the green shoots of recovery appear may be the only avenue open to an estranged couple, but it is not an easy co-existence, says Lesley Gordon, head of family law at leading Scottish firm Lindsays.
"Some may see it as a positive that couples are
finding it more difficult to separate, but the reality is very different," says Gordon. "We are spending a significant amount of time dealing with desperately unhappy couples who really do not want to be together. It's an invisible, difficult and very human impact of the credit crunch."
Marriage counsellor and personal coach Francine Kaye, known as the Divorce Doctor, also reports a growing number of relationships under unbearable strain.
"I have one couple living in a Chelsea townhouse that was worth £1.9 million and is now valued at £1 million and they can't sell it, so they are living there together, unhappily, with their four children," says Kaye. "They have allocated certain rooms to each other and have set times when each of them can use the kitchen. It's a horrible atmosphere, but they feel trapped."
Kaye is running a workshop entitled "Recession-proof Your Relationship" to give advice and support to couples doing their best to weather the financial downturn.
"Working at your marriage isn't such a bad thing, given the cost of the alternative," she says. "It doesn't matter if you live in a three-bed semi or a mansion, if you're mortgaged to the hilt then you're in the same predicament – if you divorce you'll end up with almost nothing."
