Ruth Langsford has a reputation for being a stoic, sunny soul – both on and off the television. In the awful months that followed her sister’s ­suicide in 2019, viewers would not have known from her demeanour onscreen that she was howling with grief every morning before going in to work on ITV’s daytime show Loose Women.

It’s been the same story during the long collapse and bitter aftermath of her split from husband Eamonn Holmes, which was announced in May this year.

Ruth has not said a word in public and is determined to continue to ‘take the high road’ – although I hear that privately she is ‘absolutely devastated’ by how things have transpired.

Who wouldn’t be? After a 28-year relationship and 14-year marriage – and the raising of beloved son, Jack, 22 – her husband has taken up with a blonde who is young enough to be Ruth’s daughter.

The blonde relationship therapist helps the TV presenter with his mobility scooter

The veteran TV presenter, 64, is cruising around the Med with his new girlfriend Katie Alexander, 42, a ‘relationship therapist’ from Yorkshire whom he met on social media, while they were both still married to other people.

Eamonn and Katie, who were pictured together as they joined the cruise in Barcelona at the weekend, make an unusual couple. Following a double hip replacement, back surgery and a horror fall down the stairs of the old marital home in Surrey in 2022, Eamonn has serious mobility issues; he cannot walk unaided.

Divorcee Katie, who tottered aboard wearing Zara see-through high heels while pushing Holmes’ wheelchair, has two teenage ­children and a 22-year-old.

So who is Eamonn’s new love?

Katie Alexander has a highly intriguing personal life, including relationships with two older men. Born Katie Robshaw, she was 19 and working as a shop assistant when she met coach driver Michael Devine, who is 40 years her senior. The relationship lasted for five years and they had a son named Ben, who is now 22.

Mr Devine, now 81, said: ‘We’ve been split up for a lot of years now, but I see my son regularly, maybe once a week.

‘I do see Katie now and again, but she is down in London. There are no hard feelings whatsoever towards Katie, she’s a nice woman, she really is. I wish her well. Absolutely brilliant, is Katie.’

After splitting from Devine, Katie ran the Barca café in Dewsbury, which went out of business in 2013. By this point, she had married bar owner George Alexander and they had a daughter in 2010 and a son in 2011, then separated in 2022. Alexander said he felt like the ‘luckiest man alive’ when she agreed to be his wife.

George Alexander, too, was unlucky in business. His cocktail bar company, 9 5 8, was dissolved in 2022 and his Artisan Bar Northern liquidated in February last year. A cleaning company was dissolved by compulsory strike off last year, as was a fourth company, Izzyroc Ltd.

‘I have a lot of sympathy for Ruth,’ George, 53, has said. ‘I had my heart broken when my marriage to Katie ended. It took me a couple of years to recover. I know how distraught Ruth must be feeling. She’s going through what I did after our marriage ended. Katie has a heart, so will feel bad about Ruth.’

George confirmed that Eamonn and Katie met on social media. ‘She was not swooning over him like he was George Clooney, but she liked being on social media, and one day said she’d had a reply from him,’ he added.

‘She’d commented on one of his posts and Eamonn got in touch. I must admit I laughed it off.’

George says that they parted amicably and he only became aware that Katie, by now working as a therapist, was in contact with Eamonn after the marriage had ended. He said: ‘I was surprised by it. Katie would go and visit him. It was a regular pattern.’

It was a very different story – publicly at least – when Ruth and Eamonn broke up in May. Reports confidently asserted that Ruth was the one who wanted out of the marriage and that Eamonn was ‘blindsided’ by the decision.

At the TRIC (Television and Radio Industries Club) awards in June, Eamonn asked for sym­pathy, saying that his health was so poor that he felt he was ‘on borrowed time’.

He joked to the audience that he had already suffered a knife to the back – his surgery – so why not take one more? The implication was that Ruth, his estranged wife, had knifed him.

What could he have meant by that? According to a former ­colleague: ‘All that this proves is that there is nobody who feels sorrier for Eamonn Holmes than Eamonn Holmes.’

But, thanks to his comments, the idea took hold that Ruth had cast him aside in his time of need. He moved to a flat near Kingston, while Ruth remained in the marital home, with their dog, Maggie.

Ruth received considerable criticism for ‘abandoning Eamonn’ but has said nothing.

(She still has no intention of speaking.)

But with Eamonn soaking up the sunshine in the Med with a new girlfriend, friends are rallying to defend her.

A number say that she and Eamonn navigated a path to separation, with both sides fully in agreement that the marriage was over. That happened quietly at home over a number of weeks in May.

His physical health was not a part of the decision. Ruth was, by all accounts, a devoted partner in sickness and in health, who assisted him in all ways with his care after that fall. ‘Ruth was completely dedicated to Eamonn and to helping him and caring for him,’ I am told.

Instead, what led to the split was that Ruth – described as ‘extremely dignified’ and ‘classy’ – had discovered her husband’s contact with Ms Alexander. Some reports suggest that she found messages ‘on his laptop’.

It made staying in the marriage an intolerable prospect for her and it is notable, at this distance, that the statement confirming their split was very chilly.

Not for them reaching the ‘end of the rainbow’ as Zoe Ball did with DJ Fatboy Slim, nor any grateful Gwynnie-style ‘conscious uncoupling’, or indeed any warm, ­nostalgic looking back at all. Instead, the marriage was declared over in the most unemotional terms. Their statement simply read: ‘Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes have confirmed their marriage is over and they are in the process of divorcing’.

Eamonn’s relationship with Katie had begun nine years before he split from Ruth, with an exchange on ­Twitter (now X) way back in 2015, when Ms Alexander commented on one of Eamonn’s posts and he replied.

It’s not clear when this exchange blossomed into a friendship, but reports suggest that Ruth discovered that, in the year running up to their split, Eamonn had been showering Katie with gifts, including accompanying her on a trip to a safari park with her children and giving them tickets to a Beyonce concert.

Last October, eight months before his split from Ruth, Eamonn travelled up to Yorkshire to host a charity event linked to Katie’s work. Quite an undertaking for someone in such poor health.

And Ms Alexander’s ex-husband, George, suggests that she and Eamonn were ‘meeting up’ regularly at some point after his marriage to Katie broke down in 2022. Some reports even say that she was in the habit of staying in a hotel in Surrey ten minutes away from the Holmes-Langsford marital home in Weybridge before the couple made the announcement of their split.

Friends of Ruth’s have no knowledge of any of that – but say that Ruth has been going through hell because of the attention on her estranged husband and his new girlfriend. Every time they are pictured or discussed as an item is a source of pain. Heartbroken, Ruth still wears her wedding ring.

As the dust now settles, it seems ­significant that Eamonn fell into the habit of taking ‘funny’ potshots at his wife on air during the last few years of their marriage.

Her friends didn’t feel as if the banter was all that funny – and at the same time, there was some bickering which made for uncomfortable viewing. ­During a phone-in about unreasonable behaviour from loved ones, Eamonn said that Ruth always forgot her wallet and made him ‘pay for everything’. Ruth snapped: ‘It’s not even funny, and you know it’s not true.’

Holmes leans against a taxi in Barcelona before their ship departs

Then there was a row, four years ago, over whether a vegetable was a swede or a turnip – and Eamonn was delighted to get the hashtag ‘RuthisWrong’ trending on Twitter, saying: ‘Thank you for getting #RuthisWrong trending on Twitter re Turnips v Swedes . . . though the hashing could apply to so many of her other opinions as well!’

It made her friends cringe – and wonder why Eamonn was apparently so keen to put his wife down. Ruth loyally dismissed it as jokey banter.

But there does seem to have been some genuine resentment when, in a phone-in during lockdown, Ruth mused about presenting the show from home with Eamonn and calling it Home with Holmes. Eamonn snapped: ‘Now you’re trying to hijack my name. Funny you didn’t take it at the wedding did you? Suddenly Langsford doesn’t really tie in there. You made the choice, your choice, too late now.’

Then came the scandal which led to Phillip Schofield stepping down from This Morning following an ‘unwise but not illegal’ sexual relationship with a much younger male member of staff. Eamonn gave a number of explosive interviews denouncing Schofield and also took a few swipes at Schofield’s co-presenter, Holly Willoughby. Friends say that Eamonn’s role in the Phillip Schofield scandal – giving interviews denouncing ‘Scofe’, his former colleague on This Morning, put Ruth in a difficult position.

On Eamonn’s GB News show he said: ‘Anyone watching today who has kissed Phillip Schofield, let us know.’

The day after Holly’s much-mocked ‘Are you OK?’ statement — where she addressed the viewers of ITV’s This Morning for the first time after Scho­field quit, by asking ‘Firstly, are you OK? I hope so’ – Eamonn observed of Holly: ‘You think she’s got a big mouth? She won’t be using it today.’

Eamonn claimed the young man at the heart of the scandal had stayed over with Scho­field on ‘playtime’ Thursdays, and would arrive back at work on a Friday morning in a taxi paid for by ITV. Yet Schofield insists he had only around five encounters with the man, that he only came to his flat once and he didn’t have an ITV taxi account.

Ruth was at the time – and remains – a host on ITV’s Loose Women. Holmes had by that point left ITV’s This Morning, which he used to present with Ruth on a Friday. It’s still a mystery whether she agreed to him disrespecting ITV in such a public way.

Meanwhile, last month, Katie Alexander joined Eamonn on a trip to Belfast, and they were seen four days in a row at the same budget-friendly restaurant, Papa Browns in Carrickfergus. And now they are on a late summer holiday in Europe. All the signs are that this is a serious romance for Eamonn, a cradle Catholic who will be distressed at facing a second divorce. Perhaps Katie, who charges £45 an hour for relationship counselling, will be able to help him with that.