Jane McDonald says she was never in love with her husband Henrik Brixen

Singer Jane McDonald has said she was never in love with her ex-husband Henrik Brixen.

The songwriter, who has had four UK top 10 albums, described the decision to end their marriage as "the best thing he ever did". Jane and Henrik divorced in 2003, following a five-year marriage during which he became her manager.

Despite the lengthy relationship, Jane, 62, has shared she was "the only one" who didn't realise she had no feelings for the Dutch ship plumbing engineer. Speaking on a podcast this week, the TV star said: "It's really strange this, because I should have had the best time of my life. I just got to Vegas, but I knew my marriage was on the brink.

"Everybody could see it and was going, 'that's not gonna last'. I was the only one who didn't see it. But he was a great guy, and he did his best, you know."

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Jane later reunited with The Searchers drummer Eddie Rothe and the pair became engaged. Eddie died of lung cancer at the age of 67 on March 26, 2021. Reflecting on this relationship, Jane told the Jessie and Lennie Ware on podcast that she still thinks of the musician every day.

Jane had been with Eddie since 2008, around five years after her divorce. She said, though, her split with Henrik was amicable but he struggled to "play the game" in the music industry as her manager.

The cruise ship singer, from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, continued: "He didn't understand that it's all a game, our business, and you have to play it. I was a club artist, a cruise ship singer, which was like, we don't allow this in our industry. And nobody thought for one minute that I would go straight to number one with that album (her first album), nobody.

"Not even the record company. It was a shock to everybody. And then my tour sold out massively, which was, you know, another learning curve.

"And I was learning the business with Henrik (her husband and manager at the time) along the way. So it was like, hang on a minute. This is not tallying up [..] but it's a game, and you have to play it. And then I got dropped from my labels, and I thought, how hard can this be? So I did it all myself. You don't realise that, every artist thinks they need a record company, and you don't. You just need a bit of money."

The former Loose Women panelist had previously shared in her 2019 autobiography that she started to feel "lonely" in her marriage, after Henrik ruled out the prospect of having children.