Betrayed by a father with a secret family, and a husband who knew all about it, can Tana Ramsay EVER forgive?

With the benefit of hind-sight it seems astonishing that Tana Ramsay did not find out about her father Chris’s secret double life a long time ago.

As a child she would wave goodbye every single week as he headed off for days on end on yet another business trip.

During the holidays dad would return from a fortnight of ‘meetings’ with a deep tan and would slip away every Christmas and New Year to meet ‘associates’.

   

Betrayal: Tana Ramsay's father Chris Hutcheson is said to have had two other children and a string of mistresses on the side

He could hardly have behaved more suspiciously if he tried. Yet these were innocent children and somehow Tana and her siblings succeeded in turning a blind eye to what was really going on in and around their splendid manor house in Tenterden, Kent.

What they didn’t know — but their mother Greta most certainly did — was that when daddy dearest pulled his car out of the driveway, he was motoring just a few miles down the road to the house he had bought for his second family. It is now a matter of public record that Hutcheson, 62, is a ‘serial paterfamilias’ (to quote the dry High Court ruling on his doomed super-injunction). As well as Tana and his other three children by wife Greta, 66, he secretly fathered two more offspring by his mistress Frances Collins.

So brazen was their relationship that Miss Collins even changed her name by deed poll to Hutcheson and the two illegitimate children each took his surname. Yet still Tana suspected nothing.

Not so her husband. During court proceedings this week, it was revealed that Tana’s husband, Gordon Ramsay, was aware of Hutcheson’s deceit for more than 18 months before he deigned to tell his wife the truth. Up until last year, the pair were as thick as thieves, having built up the vast restaurant empire, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, together.

Hutcheson was the chief executive; Ramsay, the creative genius and frontman.

It was only last October, when Ramsay made the shock decision to sack

So brazen was their relationship that Miss Collins even changed her name by deed poll to Hutcheson and the two illegitimate children each took his surname. Yet still Tana suspected nothing.  

Hutcheson over alleged financial irregularities, that the Pandora’s box of family secrets was opened.

Tana was devastated. Why had her husband kept this secret? Because, Ramsay insisted, he had been trying to ‘protect’ her, as he knew the extent to which she idolised her charismatic father.

It was a convenient explanation, which those who have known him for many years cast some doubt upon. ‘Gordon boasted to me about his father-in-law’s affairs ten years ago,’ says Sarah Symonds, who had an illicit liaison of her own with Ramsay for several years.

(Gordon denies they had an affair, though he has never sued the newspaper that broke the story).

‘It almost set the stage for Gordon and I to embark on our own affair, as when I realised this was how the male heads of the families operated, I felt less guilty about getting involved with Gordon myself.

‘The reason Gordon didn’t tell Tana about her dad’s affairs was obvious: Chris was one of the few people who knew about us and Gordon couldn’t risk that coming out. He wasn’t protecting her, he was protecting himself.’ All of which casts a very different light on Ramsay’s decision-making process. Ramsay once said he and Hutcheson were ‘as alike as two wings on a plane’ and that view is backed up by those who have worked with the temperamental chef in the past.

Unaware: Tana only found out about her father's secret life last October when her husband decided decided to sack Hutcheson

‘They were as bad as each other,’ an impeccably placed source told me this week. ‘Both of them knew where the bodies were buried, so there was a pact of silence.

‘The really sick thing is that when Gordon was finally caught out having an affair, Chris was instrumental in persuading Tana not to leave him. He must have known Gordon was guilty as hell, but he didn’t tell her that.

‘They were naughty boys together, especially when they went on jollies abroad. They were making millions, getting all sorts of attention from women, which a couple of ugly blokes like them would never normally be given, and they thought they were bulletproof.

‘But when it went wrong it really went wrong. And the person most damaged by it all is Tana.’

So it is that Tana finds herself utterly alone. Completely estranged from her family, including her own mother who remains loyal to Hutcheson and furious over his sacking.

Love children: Chris, 31, and Victoria, 29, Hutcheson are Tana Ramsay's half brother and sister

Chris Hutcheson pictured out with his wife Greta. Tana is said to have isolated herself from him

Tana has been thrust into a life of isolation by the shattering of her faith in all those she loves most.

This week, in the knowledge that the courts were about to lift the lid on her father’s betrayals, she went into hiding. Sources close to the family say she is ‘in a very dark place’ and struggling to make sense of the seismic shift in her life story. Ramsay, for his part, flew back to Los Angeles at the beginning of the week, while their four children have been ferried to and from their exclusive private schools in London by a collection of nannies, chauffeurs and security guards.

Tana, who cut off a number of long-standing friends after they advised her to dump her husband in the light of his infidelity, has had no involvement with her family for the best part of a year.

For a woman who had always placed family at the very top of her list of priorities (Ramsay described her as having ‘this perfect image of her daddy’), the loss has been almost impossible to process.

Last summer, aware of simmering conflict between the two most important men in her life, she engineered a meeting between them which ended with her in floods of tears and them on the brink of a physical fight. At the time, Ramsay was well aware of Hutcheson’s second family, but hadn’t told Tana. Small wonder she is confused and lonely now.

Her world imploded with a letter from her mother in the aftermath of Hutcheson’s sacking.

It stated bluntly: ‘Tana, you are not welcome anywhere near our door. I cannot believe that you have done this to your father. Until you dispose of that man [Ramsay], you are not welcome back.’

Ramsay struck back with an open letter to Greta, attacking Hutcheson as a ‘dictator’ and hinting darkly about his secret life while calling for a reconciliation between Tana and her mother. All to no avail.

As the dust begins to settle on this extraordinary affair, it is becoming increasingly clear that despite being at the heart of the affair, Tana was the very last to know what was going on.

Happier times: Gordon Ramsay with his father-in-law. The celebrity chef was aware of Hutcheson's lies and deceit for more than 18-months before he sacked him

The fallout from Hutcheson’s sacking rumbles on today, not least because most of his family were on the payroll of Gordon Ramsay Holdings.

At present, Ramsay is being pursued in employment tribunals by Hutcheson, Greta, Adam Hutcheson (Tana’s brother who was sacked as managing director last year) and Chris Hutcheson Jr (Adam’s son) for unfair dismissal. Incredibly, the Mail was told that Tana’s brother Adam was aware of their illegitimate half-siblings in the 1990s, many years prior to Tana finding out last October.

That he was apparently prepared to conceal this fact from his sister beggars belief, yet in the context of this extraordinary family unit, nothing is truly surprising. Tana took the news very badly and is understood to have tearfully raged at her brother for wilfully keeping her in the dark.

Another of Tana’s brothers, Luke, has fallen out irreparably with Ramsay and Tana after the chef accused him of using company money to buy property and failing to pay it back.

In short, Tana has been forced to choose between her husband and her family. She chose the former — not that she has seen much of him since doing so.

Having seen his restaurant empire decimated during the financial crisis, Gordon’s television career in this country is similarly on its last legs.

Just under a million viewers tuned in for each episode of his latest series. As a result he has signed a number of broadcasting contracts in the U.S., which require him to be across the pond for two-thirds of the year.

He has rented a sprawling mansion in the Hollywood Hills for the family, but most of the time he is either staying there alone or — more often — in hotels near to the locations where he is filming.

Tana, meanwhile, is left behind in London holding the children, though this week even that task has fallen to the hired help, as she hides in the South London mansion they call home. It is an imposing edifice of some luxury. The latest indulgence is a £250,000 wine cellar, which has recently been added to the over-sized building. Ferraris and Range Rovers are routinely parked in the driveway, but the one thing sorely lacking since last year has been a smile on Tana’s face.

Ramsay has gone on record as saying that his marriage has ‘never been stronger’, adding that ‘the s*** the family throw at [Tana] just makes us stronger’.

One wonders how he can be so certain, given his extended absences combined with the fact that Tana has been stripped of her lifelong support structure.

Meanwhile, former confidantes, such as the columnist Jane Moore — the wife of Ramsay’s former PR man Gary Farrow — live less than a mile away, but no longer see her.

All Tana and her husband have left are a ragtag collection of celebrity ‘friends’, who were rewarded for attending the couple’s Christmas party with expensive Marc Jacobs goodie bags. ‘Tana doesn’t have anyone to keep her feet on the ground any more — all she has left are people she knows by dint of being mutually famous,’ a despairing acquaintance told me this week.

‘The only ones they are truly close to are the Beckhams. Victoria has been a great support to Tana and they have spoken about her troubles at length.

‘But Victoria is about to have a baby so she has other things on her mind. Tana’s head is in a mess. She’s trying to make sense of a crazy situation, but she’s been lied to for so long, that she doesn’t know who to believe.

‘She’s clinging on to Gordon, but what she doesn’t realise is that he’s like her dad.’

Certainly, in forgiving Ramsay for his indiscretions with Sarah Symonds — or rather believing his point-blank denial of any wrongdoing — she is repeating the behaviour of her mother when she was a child.

Family friends from Tana’s childhood insist it was an ‘open secret’ that her father had a second family living down the road, recalling how he would make his excuses to leave dinner parties early so he could go and see them.

Multiple sources insist it is ‘inconceivable’ that Greta, currently hiding at her holiday home in France, did not know what he was up to.

Hutcheson appears utterly unconcerned about the brouhaha, beyond his enduring rage at being elbowed out of a lucrative business by his ungrateful son-in-law.

His broad smile as he posed for photographers on the doorstep of his luxury Mayfair home suggested as much.

He has done nothing to change his ways. We know of at least two more affairs within the past year or so, while he was recently photographed heading out for lunch with glamorous accountant Sara Stewart, 49, hand in hand.

As Lord Justice Eady noted in his judgment, this is ‘a man who is able to look after himself and give as good as he gets’; an individual, indeed, who readily admits to being ‘largely indifferent to what people in general ... may think of him’.

It sounds eerily like another bombastic individual, a world famous chef with a confrontational, expletive-laden approach to life.

Tana, hiding away in her dark mansion, clearly does not feel the same — but she is the one paying the emotional price for their misdeeds.