The Cultish Madgeness Of Cultism

Her irrational food fads and increasingly bizarre attempts to hold back time - via surgery, exercise and every therapy going - certainly helped to doom their marriage.

How could anyone expect Ritchie, a macho man who is fond of the pub and likes to shoot pheasant, to dine contentedly every night on quinoa grains and organic vegetable dumplings?

And how was he supposed to react when his wife took to retiring at night slathered in £500-a-pot cream and covered in a plastic body-suit to hold back the signs of ageing?

It now emerges that every aspect of life at the Ritchie residence in London was dictated by the lady of the house. Madonna, who embraced a macrobiotic diet in the early 1990s, told her chefs what was permitted: she chose the precise blend of Colombian coffee and tutted over the exact provenance of air-freighted Canadian blueberries.

Guy, then, has allegedly had to endure a life married to a 5ft 4in domestic tyrant whose rules apparently included no TV, no newspapers, and no welcome for his 'London' friends - sustained on a diet which would make a Hollywood starlet feel faint.

...Guy apparently used to complain that she was giving her children an unhealthy attitude towards food: she banned sugar entirely, which made biscuits, ice creams and cakes objects of almost otherworldly fascination for her daughter Lourdes and their son Rocco. She also banned cheese, cream, salt and preservatives.

...'If you were to use the word controlling, you would not even be coming close to describing the way she is about food.'

...So she would sit with a glass of water as Guy wolfed down his meal. The topic of discussion, chosen by Madonna, was generally the kabbalah, or an earnest exposition about President Bush. It wasn't fun.

— Alison Boshoff, describing a situation no one could call sane - or a marriage - no matter how kind the man was, in The Daily Mail