Vanessa Feltz: I want to say ‘I love you’ to a man. I really miss that

The break-up was brutal and, after 16 years of marriage, she didn’t see it coming. “I thought I was happily married and I thought he thought I was lovely,” says the broadcaster and popular Express columnist Vanessa Feltz today of her relationship with former husband, consultant orthopaedic surgeon Michael Kurer.

“I thought I was lucky to love a man who loved me back,” she adds, ahead of the publication of her confessional, warm-witted and lyrically written autobiography, Vanessa Bears All. “I loved him very much and thought a whole life by his side would never be long enough.”

So, his words one Sunday morning in October 1999 were utterly disorientating.

The “Good Doctor”, as she refers to him in her book – father of her two daughters, Allegra and Saskia, then aged 13 and 10 – suddenly turned to her and spoke in what she remembers as a “staccato Dalek voice”.

“He said, ‘I do not rule out the possibility of a divorce’. I was crying, shaking, trying to hold his hand,” she says. Above all, she was asking him, “Why?”

His reply was as chilling as its delivery: “You are just so fat, so fat. It’s hideous. You are hideous. I keep waiting for you to get diabetes.”

Vanessa, now 62, was overcome with a nauseating confusion.

“I couldn’t breathe properly. I could hardly see. This couldn’t be happening,” she recalls.

A few days later, Michael appeared to have relented and revealed that he was prepared to give her a 12-week trial period. “I had to win the trial,” Vanessa explains.

“I had to save my marriage, keep my daughters’ father in our family home to raise and nurture them. This wasn’t a challenge I could fail.”

Her recollection is indicative of the desperation she felt at the time.

Determined to become thin as fast as she could so her husband could see that “underneath the fat I have bones and features”, and would remember she was “pretty, and fall in love with me again”, Vanessa restricted her diet to apples and hard-boiled eggs, consuming fewer than 300 calories a day and training seven days a week.

But just six weeks into the project, the “Good Doctor” surgically extracted himself from their shared domestic world, abruptly packing a suitcase and informing his bewildered young children that their parents no longer loved each other and that he was moving out.

His dispassionate announcement left two little girls distraught – something that Vanessa says she will never forgive him for.

“I think that one can forgive on one’s own behalf. But I feel very differently about anyone who does anything to my children, especially the person who is meant to love them the most in the world,” she says ardently today.

“I can’t forgive anyone who causes my children pain, shock and grief, and thoroughly destabilises them.”

The breakdown of her marriage also sent shockwaves through Vanessa’s wider family.

Her grandmother had introduced her to the handsome Jewish doctor she’d met in hospital while having treatment and, within 10 weeks, the couple were engaged. Vanessa remembers a swift romance that “reverberated against a backdrop of mortality” as she fell in love with the idea of being in love, and he battled the hordes in A&E.

Aged just 22 and freshly graduated from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, Vanessa was swept along in the excitement of – as she puts it prosaically – being taken off the shelf. “Quite a lot of it has to do with the upbringing,” she admits.

“‘My God, how old are you? What,18? And you’re not married?’ And it really was like that. That’s not an exaggeration,” she recalls, shaking her head, as she recalls the emotional agenda that underscored her upbringing in a north London Jewish family, for whom marriage was the ultimate achievement. “If you’re brought up that way, it kind of sinks into your soul and your DNA.”

It was a philosophy that blinded her to the red flags waving in the breeze that must have looked like birthday bunting through her rose-tinted spectacles. Nobody thought to question whether Vanessa and her fiancé were rushing things.

After all, her mother Valerie had already begun planning the wedding within hours of the engagement. “I wish I’d had a bit more self-esteem, to see whether this was a good idea, rather than just be so grateful to be chosen,” suggests Vanessa today. “I think everyone was just so relieved I was about to marry the nice Jewish doctor that my grandma chose.”

Three months later, she was expecting their first daughter, Allegra.

Writing her new memoir, a hugely entertaining and moving confessional that sparkles with wit and candour, gave her pause for thought about her choice of life partner.

“I felt very, very comfortable with someone criticising me and telling me I was trivial and superficial and silly,” she reveals upon reflection.

“I felt like ‘Yeah, that’s right. I am’. It’s what my mum and dad say.

“And you feel, ‘That’s right, you get me. You absolutely get that I’m so lacking in intellectual rigour, and lacking a whole lot of stuff, especially the ability to resist a packet of biscuits, and I will immediately fall in love with you’. And instead of thinking, ‘Wait, do I want to be with somebody who thinks I’m lacking; why don’t I find somebody who might think I’m fun and funny, vibrant and interesting?’, but I never felt I had the luxury of waiting.

“I felt that it was particularly urgent to get married and then to find another partner when my husband walked out on me.

“I would have got married the next morning if I could have found someone.”

Sadly, history repeated itself in 2022 when Vanessa’s second 16-year-long relationship, with fiancé Ben Ofoedu – the Small of 1990s boy band Phats & Small, who is 10 years her junior – came to an abrupt end, and also amidst allegations of his unfaithful behaviour.

She met the man she brands her “One Hit Wonder” after they collided over a chocolate fountain at the annual OK! Magazine Christmas party.

But by February 2023, plagued by rumours that he had cheated on her multiple times, and tipped off by her grown-up daughters that yet another woman had surfaced, she confronted him in a cab on the way home from dinner.

Spluttering with indignation and making little sense, Ofoedu didn’t attempt to stop her as she opened the door of the moving car and jumped out into the rain.

She changed the locks that night and has not seen him since.

“It’s been a horrible, quite public break-up,” she says.

“There has been no contact whatsoever since that day, the last day of the relationship, and yet every few weeks for the last 21 months he has seeped out of a drain somewhere and found something else to flog about me.

“I tried to take the high ground on it and not say anything at all, but it’s made me pretty miserable – especially as I had loved this person. And I think I had been a loving and kind, loyal, sort of decent, faithful, smiling, encouraging kind of partner. I don’t think I had done anything horrible to deserve a war of attrition to be waged against me for two years afterwards.” She adds ruefully: “I suppose you could say my entire love life has been a complete abomination, a catastrophe, an absolute car crash.”

Yet all Vanessa ever really wanted was to be one half of a decent, loving, long-term relationship. She says this ideal means more to her than anything.

“I would have chosen a lasting and loving marriage over a career as it was the most important thing to me,” she sighs. “I still think the same thing actually. I haven’t changed, especially having had children. How could you choose any career over your children and their security and family life? What in my career have I done that measures up to that? Career is not the main thing.”

Her relationship with Allegra, a solicitor, and child therapist Saskia, is a close and loving one, and Vanessa is a devoted grandmother to her four grandchildren – Zekey, Neroli, AJ and Cecily.

Pictures of their smiling faces adorn the walls of her north London home, but she still laments the connection that was snatched away when her husband walked out on his family 24 years ago.

“That joy I am never going to have, which is, going with your actual husband to visit your grandchildren and they’re both of your grandchildren and you’re together and you’re celebrating in exactly the same way the next generation of your mutual family.

“I’m never going to have that.”

Still wounded by her split from the “One Hit Wonder”, Vanessa has spent one single evening at home in the nights since. She even remembers the date: Sunday January 28, 2024. She cooked a salmon fillet in foil, watched television and had a bath. An experience she describes with a single withering word in her book: “Bearable.”

“I’ve been single for 21 months and counting,” she says. “It’s the longest I’ve ever been single since I was born. And it’s not my happy state at all.” She adds: “I can’t end on the ‘and then I lived happily ever after’ bit, because I’m not living happily ever after – with a partner, at any rate.”

Or at least, not yet.

For despite her bruising experiences, Vanessa remains hopeful true love will not remain elusive. The woman who admits she is “genetically hard-wired to want a mate” has not given up hope.

“I do believe in love,” she adds fervently. “I hope that one day, Cupid will tap me on the shoulder, and I will find true love again. I would like to be able to say to a man, ‘I love you’. I really miss that.”

And she yearns for nothing more complicated than mutual attraction coupled with meaningful companionship. “I always feel I would love somebody who can actually read a reasonably taxing newspaper and say, ‘What do you think of this?’

“Someone who’s interested in things and would like to go and see them, and would understand them when they got there.”

What she has learned from her recent serious relationship, however, is to avoid anyone keen to use her to swig free Champagne and get their photo into the newspapers.

“Some just want to grab your coattails and let you drag them up a red carpet,” she says dryly. “But I’m certainly not plunging in with any old renegade that happens to bowl along and say, ‘I like your eyes’ or something. I’ve really just about had enough of being somebody’s access-all-areas lanyard.”

• Vanessa Bares All: Frank, Funny and Fearless by Vanessa Feltz (Transworld, £22) is published on October 24. To order for £19.80 visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25