Boris Johnson certainly has a lot on his plate at the moment. In addition to his bid for the Conservative leadership and the keys to 10 Downing Street, he must also be spending a lot of time with his lawyers at the moment. Not only is he facing a controversial private prosecution for misconduct in public office, he is also in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Marina Wheeler.
The Mirror has reported details of his divorce using tabloid newspapers’ traditional breathless and salacious tone. It reports here that “Boris Johnson plots a quickie divorce so that he can move new lover into Downing Street”. The article is chock full of the tabloid press’ usual misunderstandings and misrepresentations about the law. It says he wants a quickie divorce; there is no such thing as a quickie divorce. All divorces potentially take the same amount of time. There is no special procedure that allows for celebrities to obtain divorces quicker than mere mortals like you or me. The idea that Boris is hoping that the divorce will go through within six weeks is frankly laughable.
Most divorces take at least six to twelve months, possibly longer if financial matters are complex. Even the most straightforward of divorces hasn’t got a hope of going through within six weeks. The Family Court is so under-resourced and overwhelmed by work, it takes about six weeks for it to even issue a divorce petition now, let alone for it to conclude matters within that time. Even if Boris and Marina are a long way down the road towards resolving matters and are now putting the finishing touches to an agreement, the likelihood that the Family Court can approve it and make the decree absolute within the next six weeks are slender, to say the least. At the moment, it takes the Family Court between one and three months to even make a financial order and that is when matters are agreed. If matters are not agreed, it takes even longer.
Another example of the so-called quickie divorce appeared in this non-story in the Daily Mail. Katie Price and her husband Kieran Hayler arrive at council offices to continue the process of their divorce, with Kieran seen carrying “important papers”. Frankly, for all we can tell it could have been a Google print out of directions to the council offices. Quote why the media think to that going to a council office is part of a divorce is beyond me. You don’t get divorced at the town hall; you get divorced at a court. I suppose that they could have been collecting a copy of their marriage certificate, but it’s a lot simpler to just apply for one online. People don’t usually go together.
The tabloids have their own weird language when talking about divorces. They don’t talk like normal human beings. As far as the tabloids are concerned, people (especially married people) don’t have boyfriends or girlfriends, they only have lovers. Back in the 1990’s, the Conservative minister Steve Norris was notorious for having a handful of mistresses while still being married to his wife. From what I recall of the press coverage at the time, there was very little evidence that he had more than one girlfriend at a time, merely that he had a number of relationships with a number of different women over a number of years. But that’s quite dull isn’t it? It’s much more fun to depict an unfaithful husband as a “love rat” (another term that I have never heard a real person ever use in normal conversation).
Love rats and their mistresses always have “sex romps” in “love nests”. I have never described an affair in a divorce petition as a “sex romp”.
In the tabloids, cases are only ever handled by “top lawyers”; merely adequate or average or even mediocre lawyers never get a mention. Similarly, celebrities only have their cases dealt with by “top judges”. All court cases are “epic feuds” or “showdowns”.
Disputes about children are always “custody or access battles”. Family lawyers stopped using the word custody and access thirty years ago when the Children Act 1989 abolished Custody Orders and Access Orders and replaced them with Residence (not “residency”) Orders and Contact Orders (now also replaced by Child Arrangements Orders). But the press rarely takes the time to get this right.
Unlike in the real world, in the tabloid press, people get divorced when the decree nisi is made by the court in a hearing that only lasts 30 seconds. The tabloids never point this out, but it is highly unlikely that the celebrities in question are actually present when the decree nisi is pronounced by the court. Whenever anyone, celebrity or otherwise, receives notification from the court of the date upon which it will pronounce the decree nisi, it also tells them that nobody needs to come to court. In fact, most regional divorce centres actively discourage people from coming to see the decree nisi being pronounced, and as far as I am aware the court does nothing more than post a list of names of cases where decree nisi has been pronounced on a noticeboard at the court.
The days when a robed and bewigged judge formally read out a list of names of people who were being granted decree nisi to a court room full of people are long gone. 15 or 20 years ago, there might have been a reporter from the local paper which would then publish the list on a Friday edition; that hasn’t happened for ages. I recently spoke to someone who had represented himself in a divorce and he told me that he actually visited the regional divorce centre at Bury St Edmunds to see his decree nisi being pronounced. The court did not know what to do with him. Nobody usually turned up.
Moreover, what the tabloids often fail to realise is that the court’s pronouncement of decree nisi in the divorce does not bring the marriage to an end. The marriage is not over until the court makes the decree absolute; the petitioner in the divorce cannot apply for this until at least six weeks and a day after the decree nisi, and normal practice among solicitors is to advise clients to delay applying for the decree absolute until all financial matters have been resolved and a financial order made by the court.
Divorce proceedings are not in any way as exciting or dramatic as the tabloids like to portray them. Journalists love using these weird old-fashioned terms, partly because they have word limits and this is an efficient way of reporting the story, but mostly because it is sensationalist and therefore sells newspapers and generates clicks.
30 May 2019