After swearing she would never wed again following her divorce from Sir Paul McCartney, Heather Mills has reportedly joined that rarefied clique: the Third Marriage Club. Other prominent female members include Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath – married five times; Joan Collins (her fifth husband, Percy, is 31 years her junior) and Pamela Harriman, the Washington political fixer whose first husband was Randolph Churchill, son of Sir Winston.

As a member of the Third Wives Club myself – along with my contemporary Boris Johnson – I can confirm that third time around really is the best.

There is a 17-year age gap between businessman Mike Dickman and Heather Mills which is exactly the same age difference between myself and my third wife Laura, a wonderful milliner with a hat studio at our house in Shropshire where we run a holiday let business with occasional Fawlty Towers episodes. Only Dickman is 17 years younger than his wife. Mills first encountered him on a train in 2019 and wasted no time in making her intentions clear. She reportedly slipped him her business card, saying “I think you’re hot – email me”.

Alas, my own journey to final marital happiness was not so easy – although we did first encounter each other by email. I first met Laura in a new Italian restaurant in Belgravia whilst I was going through my second painful divorce from Venezuelan beauty and philosopher Vanessa Neumann, aka the Cracker from Caracas, whose previous boyfriend had been Mick Jagger. Our registry office marriage had lasted less than six months before she bolted back to New York with her chihuahua. It was so brutally short that the wedding presents had yet to be even delivered.

My first marriage, to Ilaria Bulgaria of the Italian jewellery family, had fared only slightly better, ending after three years with annulment. She did a runner on the night of my 40th birthday party, leaving me to make a speech thanking my wife for the party but apologising to my guests that she was not present. 

So when I was invited along to a new Italian restaurant by a publisher friend who had been offered a free table in the opening week, I was emotionally crushed – and living in an old tack room of a cottage while my house was being “restored”. Dragging myself along was one of the best decisions I ever made.

But that first dinner did not go especially well, I should add. Laura’s opening line when Alan, our host, introduced us, was: “We’ve already met by email.” A little curtly, she added: “Aren’t you the man who keeps coming into our shop and buying wallpaper and fabrics for a house in Shropshire that the building work hasn’t even begun yet?”

I didn’t get Laura’s number that night. It took two years – after being dumped after six weeks and not speaking to her for 18 months – before we finally got engaged. I buried a diamond ring in a bed of Scottish thistles, her favourite flower, in the Norman font of the little church next to our house.

I could hardly have dreamt that, in February, we will be celebrating our eighth wedding anniversary and that both our children have now been christened in that special carved 12th century stone font. Every time I see it, I love feeling the ancient rough stone and thank God for my good fortune. Only yesterday, as we walked along Holkham Beach in Norfolk on a windswept afternoon with our two children – Cosima, aged six, and Rex, aged four – I realised how lucky I was to have the sort of DNA that pursued love again after the romantic disasters of my previous marriages.