From The Daily Mail:

Pictured: The woman who wants a £560,000 payout 25 years after divorcing her QC husband

She lives in an elegant Georgian townhouse and enjoys exotic trips abroad.

With a recent £770,000 inheritance and an estimated worth of £1.7million, 66-year-old Philippa Vaughan might appear to be more than comfortably off.

Yet 25 years after they divorced, she is pursuing her ex-husband for a lump sum of £560,000 as she says her current income of £23,000 a year is 'totally inadequate'.

Mrs Vaughan claims her former husband David, a leading QC, leads a millionaire lifestyle with his second wife and two children and should give her more.

Mr Vaughan, now 71 and in 'precarious health', insists she has plenty to live on and the time has come to say 'enough is enough'.

The couple married in 1967 and lived together in Kensington, West London.

They separated in 1981, with no children, and were divorced in 1985.

Mr Vaughan had been giving his ex-wife a total of just over £27,000 a year in maintenance until last year.

However in October, more than 40 years after their wedding, Deputy High Court Judge Richard Anelay QC not only rejected Mrs Vaughan's plea for a £560,000 lump sum but ordered the immediate termination of her payments.

Referring to a £770,000 inheritance from her parents, the judge said that, along with the liquidation of some of her assets - including an antique desk valued at £300,000 - should provide her with an income of £48,000 a year.

He accepted arguments from Mr Vaughan's barrister, Nicholas Mostyn QC, that 'a single woman, aged 66, can live comfortably on £48,000 per annum net for life'.

Next Thursday, Mrs Vaughan is due to go before the Court of Appeal in an attempt to overturn the judge's decision.

Her legal team will describe it as 'plainly wrong' and likely to cause her 'real and undue hardship' for the rest of her life.

She says she is worth 'only' about £1.7million, with most of her wealth tied up in assets which do not provide an income.

And she claims that unless she liquidates many of those assets, she will be left with a 'totally inadequate' income of less than £23,000 a year.

She says the ruling also took no account of up to £200,000 she needs to spend on repairing and maintaining her £1.5million fourbedroom home in Hammersmith, West London. Against that, she puts her ex-husband's wealth at close to £5million.

This includes his pension and his share of the £4.5million family home where he lives with his second wife of 24 years, Leslie.

Asked at her listed home yesterday if she thought she was being grasping, Mrs Vaughan said: 'No, I think it's very unfair that my case has been portrayed like that and I've been misrepresented.

'This has all been very traumatic and trying. The house is lovely but my position is not as it seems.'

The warring couple have already spent about £200,000 each on lawyers' fees during their legal battle.

It is not known whether Mrs Vaughan has ever done any paid work, but she is a leading light in the Calcutta Tercentenary Trust, a charity devoted to the restoration of the Indian city's Victoria Memorial Hall and its world-renowned art collection.

Mr Vaughan meanwhile is one of the nation's leading authorities on European law and a former member of the Court of Appeal for Jersey and Guernsey.

Despite medical advice that he should retire after open heart surgery in 2006, and a stroke in 2008, he has continued to work to support his two children, aged 19 and 22, through university.

Judge Anelay pointed out that most of the QC's assets had been generated since his divorce.