“Let’s meet for cocktails at the Chiltern Firehouse,” Sara MacDonald suggests over email. “I’m going to need them.” I arrive to find the former PR and London scene fixture sitting on a banquette in the Ladder Shed bar, nursing a tequila, soda and lime. She makes for an alluring sight, with sheer hold-up stockings just visible under a black Reformation dress, and her brown hair tousled around her shoulders.
Back in London, he sent her a book of Japanese poems. MacDonald told him she had no intention of dating a married man, but when his relationship with first wife Meg Mathews ended soon after, she relented. They had their first date at The Lanesborough hotel. Sara’s mother warned her early on she was going to find it hard being with someone famous. “She said, and she was right, ‘You’re going to struggle not being the first person people look at when you walk into a room.
Two decades on, their life now largely revolves around their children – Donovan, 12, and Sonny, nine. MacDonald clearly relishes them. Her worry over her relationship with Liam is not for herself, but her sons. “Donovan’s new school friends can’t understand why he’s never met his uncle and he has started googling things. I’ve said, ‘You have to stop. You are going to read horrible things about us.’ I don’t want my boys to think that’s a normal relationship between brothers.
She walks down the corridor, and I hear her shout: “Noely, it’s your turn!” The musician walks in and takes his wife’s place on the sofa. He’s wearing a baby-blue sweatshirt and navy trousers, but it’s his spotless Saint Laurent white trainers that I notice first. Gallagher is very well-groomed, his trademark Britpop haircut flecked with silver. Those grey-blue eyes glint with amusement.