BRITAIN: The Conservatives were left reeling last night after Mrs Edwina Currie's kiss-and-tell revelation of her four-year affair with the former British prime minister, Mr John Major. And the party's current high command is bracing itself for more embarrassment as Ms Currie - a one time health minister turned best-selling author of "bonkbuster" novels - begins the serialisation of her sensational diaries in the London Times.
Lampooned for years as the incredibly "grey man" of British politics, Mr Major yesterday found himself centre-stage in a new debate - Lothario or Love Rat? - as an amazed British public discovered its former leader recast as "a sexual athlete". Beyond the inevitable sniggering and titillation, a more serious debate was raging as to how Mr Major had kept the affair secret - it ended after his appointment to Baroness Thatcher's cabinet - through the years of his premiership.
And politicians and commentators were exercised by two further questions. How the course of British political history, Conservative and Labour, might have differed had the affair leaked before Mr Major's successful campaign to succeed Baroness Thatcher? And why, as prime minister, Mr Major launched his infamous "back-to-basics" call, portrayed at the time as an attack on permissiveness, which led to a string of highly damaging ministerial resignations and scandals.
Many angry Tories turned on Ms Currie yesterday, accusing her of shamelessly seeking to boost sales of her book, or of exacting cold revenge for Mr Major's failure to appoint her to his cabinet after becoming prime minister in 1990. But one of those forced to quit his job as a junior whip in the Major administration following revelations about his private life, Mr Michael Brown, said he was glad Ms Currie had made the revelations.
Those who were likewise trapped on the wrong side of the "back-to-basics" campaign were entitled to feel peeved and bitter, he said: "In fact they should, like me, be downright bloody angry at the hypocrisy that was at the heart of the Major government."
Of more immediate concern to Mr Major will be the impact on his family; the wounded conclusion of a former Downing Street caterer, Ms Clare Latimer, wrongly accused of having an affair with Mr Major, that she was used as "a decoy" to disguise his relationship with Ms Currie; and a threat of legal action from the two magazines which he and Ms Latimer successfully sued over those false accusations linking them.
In a statement Mr Major confirmed that his wife, Norma, had known for many years of his affair with Ms Currie and long forgiven him. "It is the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed."
However the former prime minister will also be troubled by Ms Latimer's charge that Downing Street used her "to take the heat off John Major and send the media down a false trail". Ms Latimer claims she was told by the Downing Street press office not to deny the allegations about her when they surfaced in the early 1990s, and that Mr Major subsequently advised her "to make as much money as I could" from the false claims.
Ms Latimer told the Sunday Telegraph: "The whole thing was utterly untrue. But there is no smoke without fire and I now believe someone had got wind of the prime minister having had an affair with Edwina Currie and I was an easy scapegoat. That makes me upset and angry. He knew rumours were going round about him having an affair and was only too happy when a couple of publications got the wrong name because he knew he could then sue and kill the story dead."
Lawyers for the New Statesman and the now defunct Scallywag magazine confirmed they were considering whether to begin legal proceedings because the Currie revelations threw a different light on their willingness to settle Mr Major's libel action. The Scallywag solicitor said: "John Major's claim against my clients was on the basis that it was a serious attack on his reputation to accuse him of adultery. It's apparent from what has become public this was a false premise."