They’re everywhere you look at the moment, women stampeding up the aisles in matrimonial couture, tossing their hair extensions and beaming all over their professionally made-up faces because, hurrah, they’ve bagged their bazillionaire.

It’s not just the Wags who’ve struck gold; rockerista Penny Lancaster finally got Rod in the register office last weekend, thereby landing an even more serious financial proposition with Stewart’s estimated £105m fortune.

This new crop of cashed-up consorts will, of course, enjoy the sort of blingtastic lifestyle the rest of us can only read about or watch on cable telly. Private jets, hot and cold running servants, Aladdinesque heaps of jewels and more designer clothes than you could throw Stella McCartney at will be theirs.

Their existence seems blissful: they are golden geishas who don’t have to work, whose time is spent shopping or flying around the world. However, the evidence is that marrying a rich and powerful husband comes with its own high price tag.

After the wedding in the Kelly Hoppen-decorated chapel, after the pink Louis Roederer, the Gordon Ramsay pie and mash, the fireworks synchronised with Mariah Carey hits (performed in person), you’ve got to live with the guy – and this can be where the problems start.

It is perhaps surprising, in the age of self-help manuals on every conceivable subject, that there exists no handbook on being the perfect wife to a rich, high-powered and possibly famous husband. But the information required probably wouldn’t fill a book. There are few rules for the perfect power wife (PPW) to remember. The first and most important is: indulge your husband in all things, always.

Particularly in his right to be, however powerful he is professionally, a helpless baby at home. “People think of him as this terrifying person,” the wife of a famously ruthless tycoon once said, “but he’s always leaving the house without his keys or his wallet. I have to do everything for him.”

Lancaster does, too. “As soon as I checked that [new baby] Alastair was all right, I made sure my big baby was too,” she told The Sunday Times. “I was determined that Rod and I would get straight back to having romantic moments as a couple.”

So determined was Lancaster on this score that she went out for dinner with Stewart the same night she gave birth. “Looking back I don’t know how I managed to walk from the car,” she said. “It must just have been the postbirth euphoria.” No, just observance of the first PPW rule.

However, Lancaster has it easy compared with some. While Stewart may be a train and football obsessed pensioner with ex-wives and children all over the place, at least he’s not a Scientologist.

On one level Kelly Preston and Katie Holmes are married to two of the richest and most famous American film stars in the world – John Travolta and Tom Cruise respectively. On another level, that of actual daily life, Preston is married to someone who makes her stay up all night playing board games and who, five evenings a week, leaves the family home in Ocala, Florida, to have Scientology sessions at the sect’s HQ.

“My wife goes to bed at around 3am and I follow around 7am,” Travolta told a magazine recently. “We’re like the Addams family or the Munsters, living sort of an odd nocturnal life. But it works.”

Well, maybe for you, John. But it must work for Preston, too; presumably the sumptuous home in Ocala, complete with air-strip and parking for two jets, and the other homes in California, Maine and Hawaii help. Even if she never sees any of them in daylight.

As for what Holmes seems to have to put up with, Jesus H Christ. Or perhaps L Ron Hub-bard. It’s hard to know where to start, isn’t it: the sudden end of what seemed to be a reasonably successful acting career? Having to live with his three Scientologist sisters and their kids as well? The alleged “silent” birth? All that crouching she had to do in the wedding photographs?

Or the fact that, as Scientology frowns on antidepressants, the only shoulder that Holmes seemingly has to cry on if she ever feels down is the emaciated and knobbly one of Victoria Beckham, her fellow PPW.

Beckham illustrates the fact that middle-aged, mostly American megastars aren’t the only men expecting their women to tolerate a lot. Young British super-males do, too.

What Beckham has had to bear we can – with the enthusiastic assistance of various tabloids – only imagine, as she has observed to the letter the second PPW rule: never talk about your marriage (except to say nice things). “We’ve never been happier” is her constant mantra which, when you think about it, has something of an equivocal ring.

Sheherazade Goldsmith, another PPW, has said plenty of nice things about life with handsome billionheir Zac. But not all sound enjoyable. Such as having to drive a near-decade-old Volks-wagen Golf and do without heating (“We wear a lot of jumpers”) in order to toe the exacting environmental line set by a husband who nonetheless refuses to give up smoking.

Sheherazade has valiantly made a virtue of necessity – or perhaps just done without necessities altogether – and turned herself into a green goddess, writing books about rubbing your children with olive oil and only putting the washing machine on when it’s a full load at a low temperature. The beautiful wife of a glamorous moneybags she may be, but it’s far more The Good Life than the high life. Or maybe even the hard life.

Because what all these stories reveal is just how tough you have to be to lead a life of pampered leisure. The women who bag – and, more crucially, hang onto these men – could probably in other walks of life command army battalions or stride the corporate hierarchy like a Colossus.

They have balls of steel – not to mention buns, given the work-outs that looking model-perfect demands. They have the drive and determination of 10 Roman Abramoviches (of whom more later) and given the level of patience and self-denial involved – they hardly eat, most don’t drink – they have the potential for sainthood or, at the very least, for heading up an exceptionally rigorous convent.

We should respect them more than we do: far from writing them off as parasitic appendages who give the sisterhood a bad name, we should be celebrating them as tough survivalists who could show Ray Mears a thing or two. While married to Ted Turner, Jane Fonda had to service the moustachioed mogul three times a day. Compared with which, making quiche in the jungle is a picnic, surely?

Not all of them survive; many of those who don’t can illustrate the truth of the third PPW mantra: “Job? What job? Your job is him, honey”. Beckham managed to get with the programme just in time, dumped the dwindling remains of her pop and fashion careers and started banging on about being a wife and mother. Heather Mills-McCartney on the other hand . . .

Experts would have seen the writing on the wall when Mills-McCartney started insisting on the importance of her charity work and, reportedly, “Me time”. Me time! Baby, when you’re a PPW it’s him time. All the time.

Mills-McCartney apologists point out that her husband failed to consider how a sexagenarian grandad could make his ambitious and dynamic new bride happy. But it’s unlikely that he imagined he would have to. After almost three decades of devotion from Linda, reportedly being called “a boring old fart” by his stroppy missus would have been a not inconsiderable shock.

Tamara Mellon didn’t get it either. The high-powered shoe mogul either didn’t or wouldn’t realise that her husband, not her cobbling empire, should be her career. She has complained that squillionheir spouse Matthew “behaved like a child, was absent-minded, totally incapable of dealing with money, missed planes”.

No day went by when he didn’t lose his keys, his mobile or even his wallet. He needed, she said, a nanny, mother, wife and best friend embodied in “one superwoman”.

All of which, it seemed, Irina Abramovich was. But sometimes even being the most perfect of PPWs can’t save you from being dumped for younger, more beautiful models such as Daria “Dasha” Zhukova.

“I don’t know how much Irina is getting from him, but I have no doubt she has earned every penny,” is the sympathetic take on the divorce settlement by Olga, Abramovich’s first wife.

“Roman likes to be told he’s the boss, the only one and the most wonderful. As for Dasha, if she plays her cards right and doesn’t argue with him or confront him, I am sure Roman will bring her some unforgettable moments. I wish her luck.”

By PPW standards, she will need more than that.

Wendy Holden’s novel The School for Husbands is out in paperback, £6.99

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