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Big blue underpants will go down in history
Certainly, any government minister or former Tory minister who is crying shame should be ignored. You are hearing the anguished bleat of those who live in dread of their own indiscretions being revealed. For a politician with purity of intent and selfless instincts, you'd need to scour the back benches and find a well-meaning no-hoper who lives a monastic life in a bedsit all week before heading home to help old ladies get their windows fixed. And where is John Major? Touring America, earning 40 to 50 grand a day lecturing. That he can also own a beautiful flat overlooking the Thames, and apparently be considering purchasing other London properties, is because he is a former prime minister. Had Edwina Currie chosen to out her lover earlier - say when he was chancellor of the exchequer - he'd be lucky now to be offered a charity gig in Ely on a wet Friday. So it is irritatingly simplistic to regard Edwina's diaries as merely vengeful kiss-and-tell. Or to suppose that other politicians have failed to reveal their sexual peccadillos out of decency. Most wouldn't have the nerve. John Wakeham once took up most of a lunch moaning to me that, as a former whip, he couldn't make money out of an autobiography. So what did he do instead? He became a director of Enron, that's what. Let's try, therefore, to look a little beyond the brouhaha. Here is a clever woman, a competent city councillor, who achieves her goal of entering the House of Commons, determined to make her mark. In those early days, I appeared with her on TV-am. The memory of her lurid multicoloured polyester frock still lingers. We discussed childcare and working mothers and she trounced me without even trying. I wrote about it and, quick as a flash, she invited me to the Commons to have tea. It was 1987 - the height of her affair. I asked her what women wanting to become MPs must do and she said without a second thought: "Lose a stone in weight for a start." Yes! Edwina deserved to go far and for a while she did. True, when she was a junior health minister, she was shameless in promoting herself - and magnificently incapable of letting a thought go unsaid. A radio producer once told me that when he rang to suggest she stood in for Jimmy Young for a week and said he was also offering a week to Glenys Kinnock and Rosie Barnes (then an SDP MP), she declared: "I'll see those two off." Which she did. Margaret Thatcher must have briefly loved her (interestingly, the two women share a birthday), because what the prime minister believed and couldn't say, the young Mrs Currie would happily blurt out. But for all Edwina's patronising cant - telling pensioners to wear woolly socks in bed and businessmen abroad to carry condoms - she had ordinary people's interests at heart. Her eggs and salmonella remarks were a case in point. She alone was considering not farmers or the future of agriculture, but you and me, the consumers. She was right about the eggs, but no one in a position of responsibility was prepared to admit it. Ken Clarke, her boss at the Health Department, whom she loathed for his bullying, his smoking and his ability to undermine, left her to hang out to dry. One of the ironies of this week's revelations is that when John Major finally did offer her a job as a junior minister at the Home Office, it was working yet again under Mr Clarke. Was Major Machiavellian enough to know she wouldn't accept? Or simply not interested enough to care? Either way, who wouldn't be hurt, angry and frustrated to find a former lover to whom you imagined you still mattered was actually indifferent? That's another thing about Edwina: her unexpectedly vulnerable side. And to her credit, her diaries capture and expose her frailty and her wretchedness. On the one hand, a husband in the Midlands who was apparently drinking too much but of whom she remained fond. On the other, nice John Major whom she'd reluctantly let go - now heading for high office. At first she is thrilled for him. Then slowly its dawns that having taken the lift to the top, Mr Major had not the slightest intention of sending it back down to collect her. Why should he? Well, because, I believe, politically she still had lorry-loads to offer. Anyone who has seen her on Question Time must bow to her twin skills of common sense and an ability to communicate. She was miles better than many of her male colleagues. But they were not disadvantaged by having slept with the Prime Minister - a man who turned out to be more calculating than she ever dreamt. It stung all the more because, without his support, her political career was progressing towards extinction. She was, suprisingly, also sufficiently lacking in confidence to ask him outright for a job. Instead, because she can never play the victim for long, Edwina eventually carved out another career. She also bravely left a marriage that was past its best, moved to a flat in London and for a while found herself a lonely fiftysomething. She has written some spectacularly bad novels. But, what the hell, no one is forced to buy them. And now, huffing and puffing with indignation, everyone is asking: "Why has she decided to reveal all? Why not take her secret to the grave?" But why should she, for heaven's sake? I understand her need to clear the decks and reflect on what happened to her. I did precisely that when writing my autobiography. The details of the working lives of women in the 1970s and 1980s come as a rude shock to a younger generation. Twenty and thirtysomethings imagine we had the Swinging Sixties, and after that women automatically became accountants, prime ministers, judges. Well, they didn't. There was the bit in between when old boys' clubs operated in every industry. Where low-calibre men knew enough other thickies to help keep women out. Collectively, they could scorn and scoff, demoralise and shatter the fragile confidence of female colleagues without even being aware of what they were doing. Edwina has done contemporary history a service. She's also written a readable political memoir. Who will ever think of John Major again without also being reminded of "his big blue underpants"? Hurrah to that
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