FOUR CHILDREN, THREE MEN: THERE’S NOTHING I HAVEN’T BEEN THROUGH

AYESHA VARDAG insists that her own tangled love life – including having four children with three men – has benefited her millionaire clients.

The 53- year- old once said that her experience means ‘there’s nothing that my clients tell me that I haven’t been through myself ’, adding: ‘I bond with them over that during meetings. But now I’ve come full circle and I’m the happiest that t I’ve ever been in my personal life.’

That happiness is down to Stephen Bence, the chief executive of the Vardags law firm and father to their son Orfeo. The couple, who met in 2014, split their time between homes in Hampshire, London, Dubai and Italy.

Ms Vardag split from her first husband, Xavier Hunter, in 1999 after they both took lovers. She had always assumed that Mr Hunter – father of her two eldest e sons, Jasper and Felix – was ‘the ‘t love of my life’ but over time they drifted d apart.

Recalling the split in 2018, she said: ‘Over ‘O time, things weren’t right between us. I met someone else and I told him that I wanted out. Then he met someone else and suddenly I was devastated about losing him.’

Her divorce lawyer for the case, Roger Tooth, was so impressed with her preparation that he hired her as his assistant and she later set up her own law firm. After her first marriage, she had a romance with a younger colleague named Miles, with whom she had her daughter Helena.

-– She admits to be uncompromising. ‘I have to be fierce, subtle and the cleverest person in the room,’ she once said.

Ho w e v e r, that no-nonsense approach brought controversy last year when an internal memo on the company’s dress code was leaked in which Ms Vardag banned cardigans and called for staff to be ‘discreetly sexy’ but ‘never tarty’.