Henry’s comments were featured in The Independent, 2 April 2023, and can be found here. 

While they’ve been common in America and in mainland Europe for decades, prenups are “relatively new things” in the UK, says Henry Hood, senior partner and head of the family department at Hunters Law. For a long time, he says, “in England they were simply not worth the paper they were written on”. That changed in 2010, thanks to Radmacher v Granatino, a landmark divorce case in which a German heiress named Katrin Radmacher attempted to block her Italian ex-husband Nicolas from accessing her fortune. Although prenups are still “not, strictly speaking, binding”, the judgment from the case means you can expect “that the court will uphold an agreement if it has been properly entered into and the impact of it does not cause great unfairness”, Hood explains.

For second marriages and beyond, a prenup can “put to bed any concerns” about what a new spouse might inherit. “If there are grown children who are expecting various things to come their way… the stepmother is a threat, unless the potential they might have [to make] a claim after divorce is parked and sorted out,” Hood says.