Media frenzy over Major affair

By ANNE McHARDY in London

LONDON - The revelation that former British Prime Minister John Major had a four-year affair with extroverted parliamentary colleague Edwina Currie had the London media in hysterics yesterday.

The publishers of Currie's new autobiography sold the story to the Times newspaper as a serialisation.

Major, hitherto the grey man of politics, has famously been lampooned by cartoonist Steve Bell as a besuited Superman with his white underpants over his trousers.

Yesterday, papers and commentators kept hauling themselves back from the brink of bad taste to discuss the serious political implications of the revelations and to wonder if Major would have been Prime Minister if Currie had kissed and told sooner.

Then the commentators abandoned the pretence and reached for Currie's first novel, A Parliamentary Affair, published in 1994 while Major was Prime Minister.

The racy novel tells of a married woman MP who has a wildly erotic four-year affair with a Government whip, also married. From the ultra respectable BBC Radio Four to the sleazier tabloids, many quoted the seduction scene, where the woman MP slides her fingers on to his thigh and persuades the whip into her bed, and then they pondered whether this was actually fiction.

"Love Rat" screamed the headline of the Sunday Express. "Yes, Yes, Yes Prime Minister," said the News of the World tabloid, which devoted six pages to the story.

Several newspapers made fun of Major's "Back to Basics" family values policy, which he launched in 1993. "Back to basics at my place tonight John?" read a suggestive caption above a picture of Major and Currie in the Sunday Mirror.

Currie gained serious notoriety when she was sacked from the Executive by Major's predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, after saying salmonella was endemic in British eggs. One cartoonist yesterday had Currie turning to the man in her bed and asking how he would like his eggs.

Currie divorced her first husband, Ray, in 1997, the year she also lost her parliamentary seat.

Last year, she married a retired policeman in a wedding that was sold to a gossip magazine. Menu cards at the reception contained sponsorship greetings from shop keepers in her home area.

Last week, when an earthquake hit Britain at 3am she was making a radio broadcast and shrieked that the building had shaken. The tape got a fresh airing yesterday, complete with earth-moving jokes.

Currie said one hurtful moment had been when Major's own autobiography was published and she was not even mentioned in the index.

Since Norma Major had been her husband's interviewer and typist the omission is hardly surprising.

Currie yesterday criticized Major after he said their affair was the part of his life of which he was "most ashamed".

Currie told the Times that, "He was not very ashamed of it at the time, I can tell you. I think I'm slightly indignant about that remark."

The affair occupied acres of news space - causing some criticism that it was shamefully trivial with Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently contemplating taking the country to war and another equally acid comment that, for Blair, it could hardly have been better timed.