\nI can reveal the couple have split up after former model Aitken repeatedly relapsed from his battle with addiction and Victoria was unable to cope any longer. She is to seek a divorce to end a union that had started with such optimism after the misery of her marriage to Princess Diana’s brother.
\n‘She has had a horrible year,’ a close friend of 43-year-old Victoria tells me. ‘It was painful, dreadful and very distressing, but in the end she made the decision on behalf of her children that it couldn’t go on.’
\nThe couple, who have a son Samuel, five, had been together seven years. She credits Aitken with helping to get her own life back on track after the acrimonious and public divorce from Spencer, the father of her four older children.
\n‘She was looking after five children and she tried to hold the family together and steer Jonathan back on track, but he was incapable of fighting his dependency,’ says the friend. ‘He would relapse, go into rehab, get clean for a while, only to relapse again.’ Unable to cope with his mood swings, Victoria asked him to leave the home they shared in Cape Town. I understand Aitken, 40, moved out five months ago to seek treatment.
\n‘By all accounts he is doing well now, but Victoria says she will not have him back. She feels there have been too many broken promises.’ Victoria, also a former model, has herself been ‘clean’ for 14 years. As the friend says: ‘Addiction is an illness and Victoria has the same illness, so she doesn’t pass judgment on Jonathan. But it’s about self-protection and protecting her children. That’s her priority.’
\nAccording to friends, the past year was ‘very turbulent’ for the former Countess Spencer. The death of her twin daughter Eliza’s boyfriend in a road accident added to the family’s suffering. ‘It was absolutely awful, a year from hell,’ friends recall Victoria saying the other day. ‘In the end, she didn’t really have an option,’ I am told. ‘She was not going to put herself through another destructive relationship.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"