When his father was home, the Dwights had vehement arguments that greatly distressed John. Nigel and Vanessa Lawson divorced in 1980, when Nigella was twenty. They the two remarried: her father that year to a House of Commons researcher, Therese Maclear (to whom he was married till 2008), and her mother, in the early 1980s, to thinker A. J. Ayer (they remained married until eventually her mother's loss of life).