REVEALED: Why good girls fall for bad boys

Hillie Marshall, relationships expert and author of The Good Dating Guide, has no doubt about the roots of such attraction: “Forbidden fruit,” she says.

“For a woman it can be exciting to be out of your privileged comfort zone and there is the mystique of the prison background. Of course the guy has to be pretty sexy. To last, you would have to be two very exceptional people and he would have to be more willing to adapt himself to her world.” 

When Lady Alice met Melia, who became her second husband in 1995, she was running a drama workshop at Blundeston Prison, Suffolk.

“He played Macbeth to my Lady Macbeth but the last thing I expected was that I was going to fall madly in love with a guy who was serving a nine-year sentence for armed robbery,” she recalled.

“Simon being behind bars intensified the journey. You cling on to every bit of life you can give each other. You just haven’t got the time for things to go wrong.” S ADLY they did and after nearly 10 years of marriage the couple divorced following her discovery of his drugs problem and his affair with their children’s nanny – a response he said to the “emasculation” he felt in being married to a career woman. 

“For all of us there is a shadow side, the part of ourselves that we suppress,” says Lucy Beresford, host of the Sex And Relationships show on LBC, who adds that falling in love with a man from the wrong side of the tracks allows a woman to express that hidden part of herself. 

“A guy with a criminal background might liberate a woman who’d secretly love to be a risk-taker, to express her unconventionality or to break the rules.”

The biggest challenge to finding lasting love with a bad boy – however reformed he may seem – is the difference in values that is likely to run like a turbulent river beneath his public persona.

Reconciling deep-seated differences in values is something that Sarah Trevelyan experienced during her 20-year marriage to Jimmy Boyle, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967 for the murder of another gangland figure William “Babs” Rooney.

At the beginning the couple were united in founding an arts charity for marginalised people but their relationship came under strain when their values diverged.

Trevelyan then discovered Boyle, who had successfully rehabilitated himself as a writer and sculptor, had bought a villa in France without telling her.

When she visited the villa she saw its high walls and security gates. She says it was as if he had substituted his old prison for a new one.

“This is how the unconscious works,” she wrote in her memoir Freedom Found.

“We recreate the very conditions we are trying to escape but true freedom is knowing who we are inside.” 

Perhaps someone should tell that to Chloe Green.