A No-Conviction Politician, For Now

On last night's Newsnight, Edwina Currie, who appointed Jimmy Savile to run Broadmoor, laughed along as Rory Bremner told the oldest joke in the world, the one about "conviction politicians". Herewith, an extract from Private Eye, 18th September 2012:

We know know that Sir John Major lied in his 1993 libel actions against the New Statesman and Scallywag, when he instructed his lawyers to say that there was “no truth whatsoever” in the allegation that he had had “adulterous relationships”.

Since the cases never went to trial, concluding with an out-of-court settlement, a perjury prosecution would be a non-starter. What, however, of his former lover Edwina Currie, whose latest diaries were serialised in the Daily Mail last week?

Tear-jerking testimony

Interviewed by the Observer magazine in 1989, the actress Charlotte Rampling said that while preparing for her role as a Tory MEP in the film Paris By Night she had watched videos of female politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Edwina Currie.

Edwina promptly sued, saying readers would infer that, like the Rampling character, she had an extra-marital lover, whereas in fact she had been happily and faithfully married to Ray Currie for 17 years.

“It was outrageous,” she told a high court jury. “It upset me very much. I have tried hard to make sure my home and family are secure.” Ray Currie testified on her behalf, confirming what a loyal wife she was.

Her tear-jerking testimony convinced the jury. The Observer had to pay £5,000 in damages plus tens of thousands in costs for casting aspersions, however invisible to the naked eye, on her monogamy.

Boasting on oath of marital fidelity

“Newspapers must be careful what they say about public figures and their private lives,” Edwina declared triumphantly after the verdict.

“I have shrugged off most of the junk written about me over the years. This was different, because it referred to my marriage… The divorce rate among my colleagues is higher than the national average… I wanted to point out that I am aware of these pressures and I did not want them to affect my family. I hope I have had reasonable success.”

While boasting on oath about her marital fidelity she omitted to mention that she had recently ended a four-year affair with John Major, and had had another lover. For several years afterwards she maintained this pretence.

“It does seem a very solid marriage,” a Daily Mail interviewer noted on 19 October 1992. “Even when Edwina was working 16 hours a day as a health minister she says they still had a sex life: ‘You’ve got to develop a lot of stamina’.”

Compare and contrast that with her latest volume of diaries. “I wonder why I stay with him; we seem so out of sympathy,” she writes of Ray on 24 June 1992.

“I stay because no one else has ever come along offering me a home (not just no one better – no one else at all. Ever. And Ray took some persuading).”

‘I have a good-looking husband’

On 30 January 1994, in an interview with The Observer – the paper from which she had obtained £5,000 by deception – Currie said that the sex scenes in her latest novel made a serious point about the strain politics can put on marriages.

“I was lucky,” she added, explaining why she and Ray were still devotedly attached.

“The real temptation is that you spend so much time here that you find your family has disintegrated. I have a good-looking husband, and that helps.”

The new diaries give a rather different picture, full of complaints about their empty, loveless marriage.

“I’m preparing to fly to France tomorrow to join Ray, who went out yesterday with the car,” she writes in March 1994, weeks after that interview.

“But I really don’t want to go – much of the time I’m devising excuses for sleeping in a different bed, or pushing him away, or lying still in the hope he’ll go to sleep.”

Sex-free confinement in the slammer

In June 1994 Currie failed to win election to the European parliament.

“A bitter blow,” she writes in the new diaries. “Brussels would have solved a lot of problems – plenty of money, a good lifestyle, new friends, a new role in life, a lover or two.”

Lest we forget, it was the fact that Charlotte Rampling’s MEP character had taken “a lover or two” that prompted Currie to sue the Observer, insisting on oath that such an idea was not only unthinkable but devastatingly defamatory.

With this latest wodge of evidence, supplied by the woman herself, isn’t it time Edwina Currie followed her former Tory colleagues Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken into the dock on a charge of perjury – followed by a long and sex-free confinement in the slammer?