Troublesome wills

I've always been fascinated by long-drawn-out disputes over wills and inheritance. Some of the disputes might be justified, like if one sibling has inherited nothing but other siblings have inherited vast amounts, but a lot of disputes seem to be easily resolvable and not worth the time and effort. Not to mention huge legal fees.

I read that there has been a big increase in disputes over wills, partly because more people are severely hard-up and could do with a sizeable inheritance to bail them out. Partly also because the older generation are often very well-off as a result of rocketing house prices and are more likely to leave substantial sums to their descendants.

I was lucky that my mother's will was very simple and was dealt with quite easily, with neither myself, my sister, my brother in law or my niece disputing it in any way. She hadn't decided to leave £10,000 to the local cats' home or her favourite hairdresser.

Jenny and I have both made wills and hopefully they're equally straightforward and won't prompt nasty legal wrangles. We certainly haven't left money to any unlikely recipients like the local cats' home (if there is one). Nor have we left anything to any political party.

We did use a solicitor to write our wills, to ensure they were fully legal and wouldn't be challenged because of faulty wording or an invalid witness or some other beginner's error. DIY wills are tempting but open to subtle pitfalls.

But once a will is contested, the dispute can go on for years, with a large chunk of the inheritance vanishing in solicitors' fees. It's not unusual for legal fees in a long-running dispute to clock up hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Better not to give lawyers a field day.

Battle of wills

I'm always fascinated by battles over wills and inherit-ance. Especially when the legal costs eat up the entire inherit-ance. And especially when nobody will budge an inch.

Peter Burgess's mother changed her will, cutting him out of it and leaving everything to his two sisters, Julia and Libby.

Libby and Peter disputed the new will, claiming their mother was suffering from dementia at the time. Julia insisted she had been quite rational.

When Mrs Burgess died in May 2009 she left around £200,000. But after nearly four years of legal quarrelling, leading to a six-day trial at the English Court of Appeal, that sum has been overtaken by the lawyers' bills.

The Court agreed that Peter Burgess should have been included in the will and that his mother didn't understand the changes she had made.

It astonishes me that people can dig their heels in so stubbornly, to the extent that families are driven apart and absurd amounts of money squandered in the name of pride, greed and self-righteousness.

Just a tiny bit of flexibility and common sense would have avoided the whole debacle and left them all with a handy windfall rather than a gaggle of lawyers looking forward to a fat profit.

Friends and relatives must have urged the three siblings countless times to settle their differences and bring the dispute to an end, but to no avail, and the lumbering machinery of the law took over.

The problem arose of course with the existence of two wills, and the question of which one was valid. Changing one's will is always a hazardous business, liable to just that sort of posthumous wrangling instead of a straightforward transfer of assets.

The strong suspicion is that Mrs Burgess was pressured into making the change, though it seems the court made no comment on that. But it was certainly a change with devastating consequences.

Pic: not the siblings in question

The price of fame

This is getting beyond a joke. I'm really hacked off with the media's constant intrusion into my personal life, day after day, as if I'm some piece of public property to be picked over by all and sundry.

On Monday it was "Is Nick too thin? A scarily gaunt-looking Nick tottered into the Merchant Hotel as if his legs were too weak to carry him. His ribs were clearly visible through his T shirt. Now anorexia is the word on everyone's lips."

Then on Tuesday came "Is Nick the country's most embarrassingly-dressed man? The skin-tight pants and punk-style leather jacket look really grotesque on a man of his age. The female receptionists at the Europa Hotel were struggling not to laugh."

On Thursday it was reported "At the Fitzwilliam Hotel Nick was looking worryingly pale and haggard, and without his usual companion, the artist and model Tanzi Twitch. Are his vigorous male appetites being satisfied? In short, is he getting enough?"

The endless torrent of lies, false assumptions, smears and abuse is getting me down. I've instructed my lawyers Sue Grabbit and Runne to take immediate action against these nauseating scumbags. As my closest friends know full well, there isn't a word of truth in these scurrilous attacks.

If this is the price of celebrity, if this is what it means to be a household name, I shall have to consider giving it all up and going back to my old job on the sandwich counter at Pret A Manger.

The reality is that I'm a chaste, God-fearing teetotaller with a love of stamp-collecting, cheese-rolling and dressing up in women's clothing. I have an allergy to hedgehogs and I'm honorary president of the East Belfast Garden Gnome Appreciation Society.

I couldn't be more normal if I tried.

Wicked rumours

Malicious rumours are being spread that my blog posts are created in Chinese sweatshops by exhausted children working 23-hour days and paid the equivalent of 5p a week.

This is simply untrue, as a quick phone call to our head office would easily confirm.

Our 147-strong staff work in luxurious conditions
in our purpose-built production centre in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, and all receive exceptionally generous salaries compared to other less reputable blogging enterprises. World-class chefs, beauticians and hairdressers are on hand day and night to tend to their every whim, and chauffeur-driven limousines make light work of any travel needs.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what 25-year-old concept-facilitator Mandy Mouthwash has to say: "I just love working at nickhereandnow so much. It has totally changed my life. For the first time my creative talents are being recognised and appreciated. I feel I'm making a real contribution to the well-being of society. Not only that, but the guys here are drop-dead gorgeous."

The scurrilous rumours of Chinese child-labour are based on an alleged interview with 7-year-old Wah Shing in one of the tabloid newspapers.

He claims to have been trapped into blog-slavery several years ago and despite repeated attempts to escape his inhuman conditions is still forced to write continuously with no meal or toilet breaks and even when his fingers and eyeballs are bleeding from overuse. Frequently collapsing from malnutrition and exhaustion, he is mercilessly revived with buckets of ice-cold water until he resumes work.

Unstinting inquiries by my staff have failed to locate the elusive Wah Shing, who is clearly a monstrous journalistic invention with as much substance as Tinkerbelle.

I have put the whole distasteful business in the capable hands of my lawyers, Sue Grabbit and Runne.

Pic: The nickhereandnow head office at Chipping Norton

Wedding vows

I didn't realise that up till now pre-nuptial agreements weren't legally binding in Britain. So if your spouse had agreed never to claim on your private fortune, or whatever, it would never have been upheld anyway.

But the English Court of Appeal has just ruled that such contracts are in fact legally valid, and German heiress Katrin Radmacher needn't give her ex-husband Nicolas Granatino a penny - as he had agreed before the wedding.

I think the idea of a marriage contract briefly flashed through my mind before I married Jenny, but of course in our case it was pretty pointless. Neither of us had a vast fortune, a stash of Old Masters or anything else of any great value.

But if there's a possibility of gold-digging or any other kind of unscrupulous go-getting, I guess such contracts are a sensible way of preventing it and ensuring the marriage is for genuine reasons.

Mr Granatino had previously been awarded £5.8 million of Katrin's £100 million fortune, but the court decided she didn't have to pay it.

The judges said a pre-nuptial agreement was realistic when divorce was commonplace and could lead to a lot of stress and expense if nothing had been agreed about dividing up assets.

Perhaps we missed a trick not drawing up a PNA. It could have laid down a few useful markers. I could have put strict limits on Jenny's sessions of retail therapy while she could have insisted I clean the house from top to bottom every week.

Although for those couples like us who stay together and aren't likely to divorce anyway, it would just be an extra cash cow for the lawyers as they cobble together all those unnecessary legal provisos. And if you do divorce, then they sting you twice - once when you tie the knot and once when you unravel it. So keep that cheque book handy....

NB: This is the situation in English law. But the law in Scotland and Northern Ireland could be different again!

Photo: Katrin Radmacher

Unsung heroines (1)

Not many people in Britain know who Gareth Peirce is, but she is one of the most effective human rights lawyers in the country.

Most notably, she got the alleged IRA bombers, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, freed after being in jail for 14 and 16 years respectively.

Her intervention led to Judith Ward, another supposed IRA bomber, getting her conviction quashed. And she won freedom for Frank Johnson after he served 26 years for murder.

She has defended terrorist suspects in the UK and Guantanamo Bay and represented the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the alleged terrorist shot dead by police in London. In the 1980s she opposed the detention of striking miners.

Now in her sixties, she is a notoriously private person who consistently refuses interviews and publicity and works tirelessly to right miscarriages of justice. She treats those she represents as personal friends and not with the usual professional detachment.

It is said that it was her work as a journalist in the USA during the Civil Rights Movement that created her passion for human rights.

She is absolutely tenacious about her cases and refuses to give up however daunting the legal difficulties. If necessary she works 12 hour days to get at the truth.

Her extreme dedication is astonishing in a profession where lawyers are not always conscientious about their work and may turn up to court knowing little or nothing about their client's case. She finds such behaviour quite unforgivable. If only there were more like her, fewer innocent people would be languishing in jail.

Footnote: In the film about the Guildford Four, 'In the Name of the Father', Gareth Peirce was played by Emma Thompson.