This makes normal, natural behaviour in public an impossibility, which in turn creates tensions at home. When they both became celebrities – and they set out to court the attention – there was no escape; their entire relationship was played out in public. The private realm, in which intimacy could flourish, all but disappeared and with it probably the chances of them having a real relationship at all.Fame is not liberating, it is imprisoning. At least when Liz Hurley was relatively unknown, the hapless Hugh could escape back to her. With the failure of the royal marriages, celebrity couples were thrust forward to fill the empty space.None of them can have been prepared for the complete loss of privacy that resulted. We have transmuted them into our idols, made them our ambassadors in the world of celebrity The Royals are trained to play a public role.

Starved of Hollywood glitter, fed and then deprived of the romance of Charles and Diana, we helped build up the other couples into something they were not. To lose one celebrity couple might be a misfortune; to lose two could have been carelessness, but to lose four (and that is not counting John McCarthy and Jill Morrell) suggests that something more systematic is at work.So what disease of celebrity is it that has brought all these couples to grief? The collapse of each relationship has its own causes, no doubt, but several common factors are at play.Public expectation, which robbed them all of any privacy In part we, the British public, are to blame. Carling’s marriage to Julia received more coverage in the British newspapers than that of minor Royals such as Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones.Yet in each of these cases the union that made each couple really famous is over, on the rocks or at least beached. In Branagh and Thompson, Grant and Hurley, we had couples who, for the first time since the Sixties, allowed Britain to rival Hollywood in the glamour stakes.
The Princess of Wales and Hurley are among the world’s most photographed women; Grant is a regular feature on glossy magazine covers; Branagh and Thompson move between acting, writing and directing on stage and for the cinema, here and in the US. The partnerships of Ken and Em, Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant, and even, in their small way, Will and Julia followed in the wake of the failure of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales in December 1992 Where the Royals had failed, others filled the vacuum.

Last week’s news that the England rugby captain and his wife were separating had been eclipsed by an even more sensational development – Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, the pre-eminent celebrity couple of their generation, a couple who seemed effortlessly to combine talent, ambition, good looks and romance, were parting

It has been a sorry year for British celebrity couples. The arrival of the Sunday newspapers at the separate breakfast tables of Will and Julia Carling must have come as something of a relief. The Rev Clive Calver, director- general of the alliance, said the materialism of the 1980s had “left a vast spiritual vacuum in the lives of many people”.
Meanwhile, Britain’s first Christian satellite TV station has begun broadcasting. CC Europe will broadcast for 14 hours a week from studios in Maidstone, Kent, to a potential audience of 19 million across Britain and the Continent..

The Evangelical Alliance claimed people were flocking through the doors because the Christian message was put forward in an understandable way. About 200 people a day are joining churches in the spiritual 1990s and offsetting the number leaving disillusioned. Figures in the latest edition of the UK Christian Handbook show most of the growth is in evangelical churches. He concluded: “We cannot know for sure until physicists have fathomed in depth the laws of quantum gravity.”For the moment, time machines have still not got further than the pages of HG Wells.Building a Tardis, page 17.

However, Godel’s model universe bears no resemblance to the one we inhabit.In 1988, stimulated by Carl Sagan’s 1986 science fiction novel Contact, the US cosmologist Kip Thorne and two of his colleagues examined the idea of quantum-mechanical wormholes in space as time-tunnels into the past.Professor Thorne discussed the idea extensively in the last chapter of his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, published last year. He derived from the theory a cosmological model of a rotating universe in which journeys backwards in time were possible. We may not yet be able to boldly go where no man or woman has gone before, but at least we can do it in the mind.”He emphasised that while he believed time-travel was theoretically possible, it would probably never be practically possible.The first “proof” that Einstein’s theory of general relativity allowed time travel was published by the mathematical logician Kurt Godel in 1949. Dr Simon Mitton, an astronomer at Cambridge University, said: “It has been known for the past 20 years that if you can come up with a mechanism for severely distorting spacetime and creating a “wormhole”, then it would be possible at the level of equations for single particles to travel from the present into the past.”
But, he added: “It worries me that in describing circumstances in which time-travel and faster-than-light travel are a possibility within theoretical physics, popular reports often fail to distinguish what you can do for a single particle from many-particle systems – people or space-ships – which cannot participate in this phenomenon.”Professor Hawking had previously doubted the idea of time travel, but in the foreword to a new book, The Physics of Star Trek, by US astronomer Lawrence Krauss, which is due to be published next month, he writes: “One of the consequences of rapid interstellar travel would be that one could also travel back in time.”Professor Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, said: “There is a two-way trade between science fiction and science. “They weren’t beaten, which is why there is no question of any surrender. But they recognise that if they start fighting again – and some want to – they still cannot win.”It will be the first time that an Ulster Unionist leader has visited the Government’s buildings in Dublin.