Harvard professor Niall Ferguson quits wife, Sue Douglas for Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A meeting of minds: The night Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson first met at a Time magazine party in New York last May

Wife: Tory favourite Sue Douglas back in 2004

Ayaan Hirsi Ali poses for photographs showing her tattooed back which features a passage from the Koran

With their close ties to David Cameron and illustrious careers in academia and publishing, they were a formidable couple.

But last night it appeared that the 16-year marriage of celebrated historian Niall Ferguson and former newspaper editor Sue Douglas has ended.

The Harvard professor has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a glamorous Somali lawyer threatened with death for scripting a film critical of Islam.

A friend of Miss Douglas, 52, said: 'Despite all the lessons of history, Niall has set himself off in pursuit of some liberal idea of individual freedom and appears hellbent on breaking up his family.

'God knows how Ayaan thinks her feminist views square with her current conduct with Niall.

'Sue is stunned at how a man who is possessed of one of the world's foremost intellects can suddenly in his 40s start conducting a private life in a manner more akin to a Premier League footballer than a professor.'

The mother-of-three, who is understood to be in the running to contest the safe seat of Stratford-upon-Avon for the Tories at the coming election, is thought to have consulted divorce lawyers.

A source said yesterday that Ferguson, 45, has had eight affairs in the past five years, several of them in the past 18 months.

A friend of his wife said: 'Sue has been prepared to forgive Niall's infidelities over the past two or three years because she so passionately believes in keeping the family together.'

Two years ago Ferguson paid tribute to his wife and children when his bestselling book, The Ascent of Money, was published and became a Channel 4 TV series.

'To her and to our children, Felix, Freya and Lachlan, I owe the biggest debt,' he said in a dedication.

Twelve months later he is understood to have confessed to an affair. Miss Douglas flew to New York to be with him and try to save their marriage.

It seems not to have worked and last month Ferguson and Miss Hirsi Ali, 40, were photographed sharing a tender embrace at a literary festival in India.

Ferguson, who is a director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a rightwing think-tank, is thought to have met Miss Hirsi Ali last May at a Time magazine party in New York.

They were captured posing for a photograph  -  his arm around her waist  -  after being introduced by Belinda Luscombe, the magazine's arts editor.

She told the Mail on Sunday: 'In all the years I have known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend.

'She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to find guys.'

Miss Hirsi Ali fled from Africa to the Netherlands in 1992. She has admitted lying in claiming asylum to escape a forced marriage.

She became a Dutch MP and has been the subject of threats from extremists since writing the controversial script for Submission.

Its director, Theo Van Gogh, was shot dead in an Amsterdam street in 2004. A death threat against Miss Hirsi Ali was pinned to his body.

Since then she has lived under police protection both in the Netherlands and in the U.S. where she is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, another think-tank.

She has stated that, by today's standards, the prophet Mohammed would be considered a 'perverse tyrant'.

Scottish-born Ferguson, who has a home on the outskirts of Oxford, is considered a leading expert on foreign affairs.

He has acted as an unofficial adviser to Mr Cameron, worked with U.S. presidential hopeful John McCain and then quit to support his rival Barack Obama.

Last year he told the Mail that the relationship with Miss Hirsi Ali was over.

'It seems he changed his mind,' a friend of Miss Douglas said last night. 'With Niall living mainly in the States, the distance always made things difficult but Sue's attitude was that if two people really liked each other and there were children involved it was worth keeping going.

'Sue loves her husband and the children love him but it's up to him to make up his mind what to do.'

Neither Ferguson nor Miss Hirsi Ali were available for comment.

Miss Douglas declined to comment. She was editor of the Sunday Express before landing a senior post at magazine publishers Conde Nast in 2002.

Four years ago she suffered a serious riding accident at the family holiday home in Wales.

SOURCE: www.dailymail.co.uk

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