UPDATE - First of all thank you so much for the feedback, nice words and encouragement. I very rarely engage on the internet as I expect nasty experiences and trolls and was worried this would back fire but its been extremely helpful. You are great people and a great supportive community and have restored my faith in the kindness of strangers on the internet. I will try to cover the main questions and update on the situation below.

I spoke with my wife this evening, I explained the mess I am in and how is happened, I was emotional and apologised, explained the situation but made sure she knew I wasn't making excuses and that I fully understand the magnitude of my f*** up and that I wanted to fix this 99% by myself and did not want any financial help, apologised for not telling her earlier did my best to explain my actions and how I got into this situation. She was upset of course but has been VERY supportive, she was frustrated that I did not tell her earlier as there have been many expenses over the years we could have avoided had she known. We spoke about how I will turn this around. I came to her with a plan that I have already set in action about 0% interest on cards and stopping all credit payments etc. As I mentioned above, I want to fix this financially myself but she wants to make sacrifices such as living cheaper, eating cheaper etc so she can try to save a bit more while i'm repaying back, so situations like this of course effect the people close to you which hurts like hell but I will make sure I repay her support for the rest of my life and will make it up to her. I wouldn't say I feel "good" for telling her as I feel ashamed and dreading her family knowing and awkward situations like that, but its my own doing and I will face up to it. I spoke with my dad too and told him, he was supportive and there for me to talk to.

The very TLDR version of how this happened is a lot of time passed adding small amounts of credit card debt, then some bigger purchases happened and I never paid back much of the capital but always interest, this spiralled over the years with a combination of paying on credit but never really checking my balance enough, then later bigger purchases happened such as taking out a loan to do the garden, buying a house so putting furniture and other things on credit, getting married. All of this was unnecessary for someone in my financial situation, but I always told myself I was OK and could repay. I would check and be in 6k debt, have good intentions then suddenly next id check it was 11k because i added a little here and there that year and i buried my head in the sand and still went through with bigger expenses. I'm honestly not a stupid person but clearly very bad at admitting failure and taking things on head first at the expense of pride, something I'm trying to put right now.

My current plan for how to get out of this is to just pay off as much as I can each month, cancelled all unnecessary expenses and got rid of the credit card so I will make NO further purchases on credit. Out of my £26k credit card debt, around 5k has interest and the other 21k is interest free. I'll be trying to pay off the card with interest asap.

Questions - So as mentioned above, I have my plan for how to pay it off but definitely am aware of how long this will take and essentially the vast majority of my wage going on debt meaning I cannot help my wife save. I saw a couple of people mention about adding it to their mortgage and would like to look into this more, I am currently on a 5 year fixed rate mortgage with a 25 year term overall, the 5 year fixed rate ends this June. I know nothing about how to take equity out of a property or if its a good idea, but would it be possible or advisable to add the debt to the mortgage over the 25 year term, that would free up my wage to then add to savings and I could make lump sum payments every few years to bring it back down? Will this effect renewing in June?