The Dominic West saga is a reminder that famous men have an endless capacity to disappoint

I hope she gave him hell, I hope she pelted him with narcissus bulbs (she’s a landscape gardener); I hope he really had to grovel. Infidelity is bad enough, but infidelity committed on an electric scooter - like some crap 2020 answer to Roman Holiday - is surely beyond the midlife crisis pale.

Not since Colleen Rooney turned Internet sleuth on….. Rebekah Vardy has a celebrity scandal ignited so much public interest, even among those who pompously sniff that they don’t ‘do’ celebrity gossip (to those people I say: get over yourselves, it’s just anthropology.)

Were it not for the masks, those long lens pictures of Dominic West, 50, sans wedding ring, slinking around with 31-year-old actress Lily James (creepily cast as his daughter in upcoming drama The Pursuit of Love) on the streets or Rome earlier this year would look utterly retro. Didn’t 2020 put the breaks on affairs? Don’t we have enough contact tracing to deal with? But who could have guessed the truly retro moment was still to come.

In a publicity move not witnessed since 2006, West and his wife of 10 years Catherine FitzGerald not only chose to stride out of their Wiltshire home to greet the press together - with all the wholesome energy of Michael and Carole Middleton after Kate’s engagement – but they even produced a co-signed handwritten note declaring there was Nothing To See Here: ‘Our marriage is strong and we’re still very much together’ it read.

Who knows what went on behind the doors of the couple’s Wiltshire home when the news broke. Was this all a horrendous shock to Catherine or had she taken the I-don’t-care-what-you-do-I just-don’t-want to-know stance of a wife whose husband once told this newspaper that “women should be more indulgent of affairs”? My suspicion is she was most horrified by the crassness of it all.

The daughter of the final Knight of Glin is not a public figure, but this week’s saga called to mind a video I watched earlier this year of her and West doing a tour of her rescued ancestral seat, Castle Glin in Ireland. While West bounced around like a puppy, cracking Dad jokes about the oil paintings, Catherine projected a combination of warmth, intelligence and no-nonsense charm - as much as you can gather from a house tour video, she seemed like a woman who wouldn’t take any rubbish lying down from the man she first met at University in Dublin and married years later.

Famous men appear to have an endless capacity to disappoint. It’s why we deify Tom Hanks for being a nice man and staying with his lovely wife - countless A-list women would meet that criteria. Though clearly not a totally innocent party in this, naturally the ‘other woman’ in this saga, Lily James, has been hung out to dry as West slinks back to the family home.

No woman should be compelled to do a public stand-by-your-man photo call after national humiliation; it was a show of generosity he probably doesn’t deserve, and an oddly classy one given the circumstances. I’m sure he knows it. In any event, he’s lucky to have her.