Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson: when the ugly side of passion rears its head Seizing your interlocutor by the throat is never anything but a brutish way of silencing dissent. Anyway, if no harm was done why was Nigella, a famously proud non-crier, clearly so distraught? Crying in the street is horribly exposing; the soft body of the private self is outside its shell for all to see. How much worse must it be to lose control like that when you're the nation's Domestic Goddess and your wretchedness is destined to make front-page news? I don't know anyone who doesn't feel desperately sorry for her. I once sat next to Saatchi at dinner and liked him a lot. Vast wealth hasn't made him pompous or a bore. He has a wayward charisma. When he fixes you with his languid, slightly wolfish attention, you feel the gravitational pull that attracted a fortysomething Nigella to a twice-married man 17 years her senior. If that makes them sound like a couple out of a romantic novel, that's because they are. But fortunes as large as Saatchi's can also make you a law unto yourself. A book of his observations, published last year, was called Be The Worst You Can Be: Life's Too Long for Patience and Virtue. In the light of events, the title no longer seems like a good joke. More like a bad omen. A languorous cad might say those words, but so would a bully. For the reclusive Saatchi to go into a police station and accept a caution for assaulting Nigella is an unimaginable humiliation. He would only have done it to try to kill the story. More importantly, he wants to rescue his marriage, which I suspect the old grump holds very dear. Meanwhile, Nigella, whom friends say is devastated, chose not to speak out in his defence. That duty fell to a previous Mrs Saatchi, Kay, who said that, although Charles was "hard work," he was never physically violent. Kay, who had to learn from a teacher at her child's school that her husband was divorcing her, has no reason to do her ex a favour. That she insists he is "being unfairly treated" must be chalked up in his credit column. Yesterday, as the media storm raged, Nigella posted a recipe on her Facebook page. It was for tiramisu, a comfort pudding if ever there was one, although most of us would be beyond comforting in such a situation. Food is not just the TV cook's career, it's her refuge. Suggestions that How to Be a Domestic Goddess, with its emphasis on nostalgic baking, reflected the author's blissful home life were always painfully wide of the mark. Having lost both her mother and younger sister to cancer, Lawson then had to watch her husband, the journalist John Diamond, die of throat cancer in 2001. A widow at 41, she was left with two small children and a sense of life's darkness. It was hard, she said, not to believe there was "a sniper in the garden picking off everyone you love." Charles Saatchi provided Nigella with a sense of security and permanence that let her blossom and grow. If the rumour that he was so besotted with Nigella he brushed her teeth for her was a bit icky, it was evidence of a grand passion. And passion is a far more unstable element than affection. A crush can be crushing for the object of desire. In the 10 years since their marriage, the dynamic has changed. Nigella, still in her prime at 53, is now the bigger name, while Saatchi's powers, if not his fortune, are waning. A 70th birthday can be depressing for a man of even average vanity who is sitting across a lunch table from a woman who has become every bit as beautiful as he always told her she was. According to Nigella, tiramisu was invented in a brothel to give working girls a pick-me-up. The Domestic Goddess will need one as she weighs up whether to heed the advice of total strangers to "get the hell out of the marriage" or stick by the man who has done her much good before the recent harm. Whatever she decides, one thing is certain: it should be her choice, not ours. So how did you score on the top 50 tell-tale signs of ageing? The list seemed clichéd, patronising and wildly old-fashioned to me. Surely it's time to bring the signs of ageing up to date. If you have any suggestions please send them. Meanwhile, here are some of mine: At a preview of the astounding new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical, you see that lovable, doddery old Grandpa Joe is played by Nigel Planer. Yes, of The Young Ones. You have tweezers hidden in the car dashboard because the mirror affords you the best view of chin hairs that sprout like evil hog's bristles after you turn 45. You cook a barbecue indoors, in the oven. The sad café at the local garden centre, which smells of toasted guinea pig, starts to exert a powerful fascination. You think you might buy a parrot, but worry it will outlive you. The BBC has joined the list of public services spending our money on gagging orders. To be precise, £28 million of licence-fee payers" money has been wasted in the last five years buying the silence of 500 staff, some of whom received payouts of up to £500,000. That kind of money could buy you a couple of decent drama series, 21 ties for David Dimbleby, a normal dress for Emily Maitlis, a smile for Orla Guerin, a handkerchief to wipe Mark Mardell's profusely sweating brow and still have enough left over for Tom Jones's Jacuzzi at the Savoy. As with the secretive NHS gagging orders, you have to ask why public servants are allowed to use public money to prevent employees telling the public the truth about a culture of bullying or the misuse of funds. The BBC gags are so legally binding that former employees cannot even speak to their spouses about them. Tony Hall, the new director-general, has introduced a £150,000 cap on severance payments. It's a step in the right direction, but he needs to go further. The only kind of gags the BBC spends our money on should be in sitcoms. There are few things one can be certain of remembering on one's deathbed, but my Brownie Guide promise will surely be among them. After all these years, it comes back like a prayer, as clear and resonant as a bell. I promise that I shall do my best, shall do my duty to God. To serve the Queen and help other people and keep the Brownie Guide law. Nothing much to argue with there, you might think. Pretty timeless, immutable values. When I was Sixer of the Pixies - my first and, indeed, my only title - the Promise was an unarguable part of Brownie and Guide life, like the threepenny bits and half crowns we left in Sarson's vinegar overnight so they would be shiny new for the church collection plate on Sunday. Well, not any more. From now on, Girl Guides will no longer promise to do their duty to God. Instead, they will say, "I promise to be true to myself." Ugh. What newfangled self-helping twittery is this? Chief Guide Gill Slocombe insists that the previous oath was "confusing" about belief and "discouraged some girls and volunteers from joining us." As the Promise has been in use since 1910, and generations of us have managed to say it without any difficulty, I'm not sure what she means by confusing. God is a pretty capacious term, covering a multitude of blessings (as well as sins). I don't recall any of my Pixies, though they came from several creeds or none at all, faltering over the words, although we were always worried we would mess up the three-fingered salute and end up flicking the V-sign at Brown Owl. I am with Andrea Minichiello Williams of Christian Concern on this one. A former Brownie herself, Andrea says: "This is a sad day. It runs against the tradition and history of the Guide movement, which was rooted in Christian values. What does promising to be true to yourself mean? As if you arrive as a young Brownie with a perfectly formed self to which you must be true. There is far too much obeisance towards children, which does them no good at all. How about improving yourself by serving things that are bigger and more important than the individual? What next? A Brownie badge tattooed on to your inner thigh instead of sewn on to your uniform? Safety in the Home to be replaced by lapdancing? As Sixer of the Pixies (Retd), I can only hope the Guides think again. Two words that strike fear into the hearts of men: "smart casual." Jeans or chinos, suit or jacket, short sleeve or long, illicit girlfriend or seething wife; however you play it, you go wrong. If the words are bad news for ordinary mortals, however, imagine how much worse they are for politicians, few of whom know how to dress in the first place. Hence the fiasco at the G8 summit this week, when the conflict in Syria was equalled, if not overshadowed, by an even graver matter: exactly how much of Herman Van Rompuy's bare clavicles does the world wish to see? Let's be clear. You can wear a suit without a tie, on two conditions. One, the suit needs to be of the highest grade, woven from the chest-hairs of privately educated sheep. And two, you need to be Barack Obama. Otherwise, you end up with the deeply uncomfortable gallery of statesmen who were photographed at Enniskillen, as in a police line-up. David Cameron looked as if he had left his tie in the car; Vladimir Putin looked as if he had left his tightly knotted around the throat of a political opponent; the Japanese prime minister, unhindered by any tie, had had a rush of blood and opted for deck shoes as well, and may have to be dissuaded from wearing a ripped T-shirt and winklepickers next time. Francois Hollande, as usual, looked like a misplaced maître d," who needed not just a tie but an apron and a white napkin over his arm to complete the look. What politicians and their advisers fail to grasp is that no one, but no one, is impressed by this bid to dress down. Nobody exclaims, "Well, I didn't really agree with what Stephen Harper said about Canada's commitment to free trade until he undid his top button, and then all became wonderfully clear," just as nobody has ever found a cricket match to be more enjoyable, or comprehensible, simply because England have taken to wearing red pyjamas. Cricketers wear white, and politicians wear suits; this frees them up to do their best, and allows us, undiverted by fripperies, to judge them on it. The lucky winner in all this, of course, is Angela Merkel. Jacket and trousers, from day one, and no messing around. You think you could cram her into a fluffy onesie, in the colours of the German flag? Good luck with that, people.