by NICK CRAVEN

Last updated at 13:17 15 March 2007

As a judge and highly successful barrister, Charles James Monckton Miskin QC is used to dealing with deceit on a criminal level.

During the complex fraud trials in which he specialises, his brilliant legal mind cuts through the elaborate web of lies woven by many of those he encounters in court.

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Privately, however, the 54-year-old married father of seven used his intellectual agility to commit deception on a monstrous scale. Last year, having lied to his family and friends, he abandoned his pregnant wife to set up home with his married former college sweetheart.

The sorry tale of how one of Britain's most respected lawyers destroyed two happy families is as tangled as one of Miskin QC's cases. It involves - among other things - a secret love affair spanning almost four decades, a wedding to his second wife at which his wealthy heiress mistress, Catherine Kennaugh, was a guest, and later a street brawl with his lover's cuckolded husband - an encounter that left Miskin's fine cashmere sweater covered in blood.

It's all a far cry from the hushed atmosphere of the courtroom - and certainly not the kind of behaviour expected of a judge. But, as we shall see, Judge Miskin's behaviour has been anything but honourable.

The roots of this extraordinary story can be traced back to the 1970s when Charles Miskin, an old boy of Charterhouse, first met Catharine.

He was reading Jurisprudence at Worcester College, Oxford. She was studying History of Art at Cambridge.

They briefly became lovers, but their relationship evolved instead into a close friendship.

They were close enough that they attended each other's weddings: Catharine to Patrick Kennaugh, a onetime antique toy seller, now a successful art dealer in Fulham; Miskin to his first wife, glamorous Karen Booth, with whom he had four children.

Patrick Kennaugh vividly remembers his first encounter 30 years ago with Charles Miskin, a former chairman of the Bar Theatrical Society - for the most unlikely reason.

The cigar-chomping young lawyer, who was among guests at a party at his wife's parents' house, was wearing mascara.

'I light-heartedly asked him about that,' recalls Patrick. 'He kept denying it until, finally, I joked with him that if I was in a court of law and produced a witness from Max Factor who testified that he was indeed wearing make-up, how would he answer?

'Then he grudgingly admitted it. It was the late 1970s and he was just making his way as a junior barrister. He always a flamboyant, theatrical figure.'

The Kennaughs - joint proprietors of the Hollywood Road art gallery in Fulham for the past 24 years - saw Miskin marry first wife Karen near London's High Court in 1982, and the Miskins were frequent guests at dinner parties held by the couple at their house overlooking the Thames in Putney, South-West London.

But Patrick Kennaugh could never have suspected that Miskin harboured a secret affection for his wife Catharine, who found the tall, dashing barrister's company hugely entertaining over the years.

In fact, some years later Miskin left his wife, Karen, and in the mid-Nineties he moved in with fellow barrister Angharad Start at a fourstorey house in a leafy enclave of Stockwell, South London.

By now his career was going from strength to strength. He was named among the 'Best of the Next Generation' by influential The Lawyer magazine in 1996, became a QC two years later, and shone in the highly specialised - and equally lucrative - field of criminal fraud.

Thanks to long, drawn-out trials and fat fees, his salary rose to around £500,000 a year. While his career flourished, he and Angharad had two children together. Their life, for all the world, seemed complete.

Indeed, in 2005, they chose to seal their union with a lavish wedding ceremony at Southwark Cathedral in London, after which guests were ferried by paddle steamer to Chelsea Physic Garden.

After taking their seats inside the vast marquee erected in the grounds of the 17th-century walled gardens, the audience guffawed politely when Miskin's best man quipped: 'I hope this is the last time I'm called upon to perform this ceremony for you, Charles.'

Had anyone glanced at 50-year-old Catharine Kennaugh at that moment, sitting close to the bridal table next to her husband, Patrick, they might have noticed the merest suggestion of a nervous blush on her face.

In fact, for the previous year, she had been committing adultery with Judge Miskin, the man she first fell in love 30 years earlier when they were both Oxbridge students.

Less than a year after that idyllic summer wedding, Judge Miskin dropped his domestic bombshell, walking out on Angharad - despite the fact she was six months pregnant with their third child - and announcing his affair with Catherine Kennaugh through email which he sent both to his wife and his love rival, Kennaugh.

Summing up his predicament in the kind of restrained, erudite language usually reserved for the courtroom, he wrote: 'Sentimental affection turned into a private and sexual excitement. C's (Catharine's) and my relationship - I will not call it an affair - started long ago, with incidents in 1978, 1991 and 2004.'

As Patrick Kennaugh soon discovered, such 'incidents' blossomed into a fully-fledged love affair, and Miskin and Catharine were seeing each other on most days behind their respective partners' backs.

Often they met at the flat in Fulham which Miskin had inherited from his late father, Nigel, just across the Thames from the Kennaughs' family home.

As Patrick puts it: 'I have no idea why he married Angharad after they'd been together for nearly ten years - especially as he was having an affair with my wife.

'How could he make his marriage vows in the full knowledge that he was carrying on an affair at the time - and with a woman sitting in the congregation?'

Patrick is hurt and angry, but says he feels more for Miskin's spurned wife Angharad than he does for himself.

'Her personal and professional pride has been severely dented,' he says. 'She's a tough, well-skilled barrister herself, but make no mistake, it's a man's world and she's junior to him. She's been battered from all sides.

'It was reprehensible to have led her down the garden path to get married and have a third baby, considering what he was up to.

'My wife was also the last to know about Angharad being pregnant, which is equally bad since he was carrying on with Catharine at the same time.'

It was February 2006 when Catharine - who stands to inherit a £3 million fortune from her godmother, who lives in Argentina - first told her husband she was leaving him for Miskin.

It was one of their grown-up sons who dropped the bombshell news to