After more than 20 years together, Leigh Sales has split from her husband.

Host of 7.30 and one of Australia’s most respected political journalists, Leigh Sales, has split from her husband, Phil Willis.

After marrying back in 1996, it’s believed the couple split sometime over Christmas. Sales and Willis have two children together, Daniel, 5, and James, 3.

It’s been a rough few years for the 43-year-old journalist, who, after the birth of her second child, suffered major health scares. Talking to Mia Freedman about the immediate aftermath of her second birth, Sales has since described the time as the “worst year of [her] life”.

“The end of (my second) pregnancy (in 2014), I had a really disastrous birth, I had a uterine rupture… I had a massive hemorrhage and emergency surgery and stuff,” Sales told Freedman at the end of 2015.

“So I woke up…. and I didn’t even see him for the first few days. I didn’t hold James for three days. I didn’t have him in my room till day four…. I wasn’t even conscious when he was born.”

Sales was in hospital for weeks on end following James’ birth. And then at five weeks, James got viral meningitis.

“It was definitely the worst year of my life, easily,” Sales said.

More than that, she added her and James’ illnesses were compounded by her inability to look after her two young boys.

“For me to be thrown into a circumstance where I had absolutely no control and was then at the other end of it incapable of looking after myself, incapable of looking after my three-year-old and after a newborn baby, it was very, very confronting and hard for me to take,” she said of the period.

Sales is yet to comment publicly on the split.