Lord Patten's daughter weeps as the husband she's adored for 30 years is found ... trends now

Like many of the neighbouring houses on the high-end leafy street in North-West London, the two-storey terraced house belonging to Elton Charles and his wife Laura Patten is a smart affair, with a gravel driveway and neat white shutters.

There is one additional feature which makes this attractive £1.5 million home stand out however: next to the front door is a multicoloured spray-painted sign bearing the word ‘hope.’

It is a cheery message no doubt intended to buoy those who come and go from this family home — but one that is today undoubtedly laced with poignancy for its five inhabitants.

For yesterday, 51-year-old father-of-three Charles was found guilty on charges relating to a shooting at a West London restaurant by his younger half-brother Nathaniel St Aimie.

In horrifying scenes on a warm but rainy evening last September, St Aimie sprang from a passing white Volkswagen van and opened fire on the PBK Indian restaurant in Greenford as his brother waited nearby.

A shot-gun blast shattered the window and glass sprayed the dining room as diners — including children — screamed in fear as the gunman sprinted back to his van.

The incident lasted mere minutes, but it was long enough to terrorise customers and turn Laura Patten’s life upside down: yesterday her husband, who runs a property maintenance company, was found to be part of the plot hatched by St Amie — who describes himself as a ‘courier’ — and convicted of a charge of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

St Aimie, 44, had earlier pleaded guilty to the same charge.

Charles’ conviction — along with that of Nicholas Grant, 46, and Lee Morgan, 42, who allegedly supplied the weapon — came at the end of a six-week trial after the jury had deliberated for seven hours.

Members of the defendants’ families in the public gallery gasped as the guilty verdicts were returned and Lord Patten’s daughter Laura held her head in her hands and wept.

All the defendants face a custodial sentence — a desperate turn of events for anyone, but especially so for Charles, for whom incarceration will be a sobering chapter in a relationship that has long fascinated onlookers, bringing together the beautiful daughter of a Tory grandee with a former painter and decorator whose family had arrived in the UK from the Caribbean.

The middle daughter of Hong Kong’s last governor Chris Patten and his former barrister wife Lavender, Laura Patten sprang to fame in the summer of 1992 when she arrived in the former British colony clad in a miniskirt and bustier top, sparking a media frenzy. Together, she and her younger sister Alice — now 43 and an actress, and 50-year-old documentary maker sister Kate — were nicknamed ‘The Three Graces’ by starstruck local press.

Laura was determined to maintain a low profile, but when, ten years later, she and Charles announced their nuptials it was amid a flurry of newspaper headlines dwelling on the apparent incongruity of the match.

Yet save for an early blip, when the couple separated for several weeks around seven months after their 2002 wedding, the couple have more than defied the naysayers.

Their marriage has lasted 21 years, they are raising three children — Elodie, 17, Willow 15 and 12-year-old Noah — and latterly appear to have settled into a life that can only be described as resolutely and comfortably middle-class.

Laura is a Pilates instructor, and Elton works in construction management, and like so many other parents, the lion’s share of family activity is centred on ferrying their children to and from football fixtures and other commitments.

Charles’s conviction throws a bomb into the middle of all this —although according to a friend of the family who the Mail spoke to in recent days, it will make no difference at all to Laura’s ongoing devotion to a man to whom she first gave her heart as a teenager.

‘She’s loved him for 30 years,’ the friend said. ‘She won’t stop whatever happens.’

Theirs has certainly been a longstanding love story: the pair met in the spring of 1992 when Laura was only 17 and Charles 20.

It was a collision of two very different worlds. Charles was raised in North-West London alongside six half siblings — among them Nathaniel — by his West Indian mother Elizabeth.

His father Roger was an immigrant from Guadeloupe who spray-painted cars to provide for his family, but did not remain on the scene for long.

‘I’m more like his dad than his friend,’ Charles explained of his relationship with Nathaniel, at 44 six years his junior, while giving evidence earlier this month. ‘You know, Dad wasn’t around, so I’m the one who looks after the family for support.’

After finishing school at 16, Charles got a job as a painter and decorator, before setting up his own business as a florist after meeting his future wife.

Her background could not be more of a contrast. As the daughter of a longstanding MP once touted as a future leader of the Conservative party, Laura was raised alongside her sisters Kate and Alice, in a comfortable family home in the affluent riverside suburb of Barnes.

Behind the veneer of privilege, however, Laura had the makings of someone who forges her own path. Aged just 11 she refused to attend the exclusive Godolphin and Latymer school where her sisters were educated to attend a London comprehensive, and when her father, to whom friends say she is devoted, was defeated as MP in his Bath constituency in 1992, she was so furious that he had not been allowed to give a farewell speech that she took it upon herself to galvanise his team to sing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ in

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