Lord Birt, the BBC Director-General during most of the 1990s, said that he would divorce Jane, his university sweetheart, to marry Eithne Wallis, former head of the National Probation Service.

In a surprisingly frank statement, a solicitor for Lord and Lady Birt said: “It is with real sadness that Lord Birt has sought to end his marriage. He also wishes it to be known that he intends to marry Ms Eithne Wallis when he is free to do so.” Lord Birt and Ms Wallis are believed to have met when she was employed in the Home Office and the peer was carrying out “blue skies thinking” on criminal justice and community relations for the Prime Minister.

The former BBC boss is an unlikely romantic, with a personality that even close friends concede is shy and reserved. As Director-General from 1992 to 2000, he was best known for introducing complex bureaucratic reforms to modernise the BBC, and was unpopular with stars and producers at the corporation.

John Birt met his wife, then Jane Lake, an American-born painter, while he was studying at Oxford University in the mid-1960s. He was 18 and Miss Lake 20 and it was she, according to his biography, who “introduced me to . . . the idea that you should bathe every day and not just once a week”.

They married in Washington in 1965 and during the ceremony Mr Birt (as he then was) winked at the cleric “to share my joy”. The minister interpreted the wink as “a disavowal of all our promises” — a reaction that the groom felt was so severe that he “became an unqualified atheist” on the spot.

The separating couple have two grown-up children, Jonathan and Eliza. Speaking through her solicitors, Lady Birt said: “The parties view the ending of their marriage with great sadness, but both wish the necessary arrangements to be made civilly and in a spirit of goodwill.”

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