Is £20m enough for you?

John Charman, an insurance underwriter, has paid his estranged wife, Beverley, £20m in a divorce settlement. The High Court has ordered him to pay her £48m. Now he is appealing the decision, arguing that £20m should be enough for any ex-wife.

There's nothing like a big court battle over personal dosh to stimulate salivary glands all across the home counties and all those other belts of middle-class conservatism up and down the UK. This is why page 3 of the Daily Telegraph (it's very own titillation page) today features the Charman divorce alongside a "taster" for a much bigger one to come - Mills v McCartney.

Mr Charman says he is battling for justice, "not just for me but for all decent, law-abiding, successful business people facing divorce." Call me an old cynic but, if you ever sought a definition for the word "minority", there you have it. It's not often that you read the words "decent", "successful", "law abiding", and "business people" in the same sentence.

Of course Appeal Court Judges are incapable of being swayed one way or the other by a newspaper article sympathetic to a wealthy 54-year-old man who can have nothing whatsoever in common with middle-aged bewigged and relatively impecunious lawyers.

Poor lady

But we are. I wonder how many people saw the picture of Mrs Charman stepping out of her BMW "4x4 alongside a picture of her grand home in Sevenoaks, then read about her £500,000 a year income after tax, and thought: "Oh that poor, poor lady, she should take him for all he has"? Did you?

There are a few details about Mr Charman that I admire. He is a self-made man who came up the hard way in a business that, when he joined, as he points out, could hardly be described as a meritocracy.

Now he lives in a tax haven, at the helm of an almost £3bn market cap company that he founded. I can excuse him all that, but does he have to wear a chunky gold ring on his left little pinkie? I hate overstated male jewellery. It's not even metrosexual.

Boring Bermuda

For the rest, well, he has to live with it. Have you been to Bermuda? It's the most boring island on the planet. The fishing isn't great either. Why David Bowie should choose to have a house there, God only knows. What kind of place fixes its male business attire as suit jacket and tie with shorts, brogues and knee-length socks?

The Charmans must enjoy this sort of thing - the court battle, that is. I suppose it brings both of them the 15-minutes of fame that so many crave these days. They can dine out for years on all this stuff. It certainly keeps the Telegraph readers entertained.

Whatever the outcome for Mrs Charman, she should stay well clear of Bermuda. On the harbour wall there is a working model of a ducking stool that the island once used to deal with difficult wives. I bet there are one or two Bermudian men who wish they still used it today.