Currie hits back at Mary Archer and her 'little runt' of a husband

It was the day the "fragrant" one got egg on her face.

Edwina Currie had waited for the right moment to respond to the scathing remarks of Lord Archer's wife Mary, who suggested John Major had suffered a lapse in taste when he conducted his affair with the former Tory minister.

As Lord Archer's prison sentence looked likely to be extended in the wake of the publication of a rule-breaking diary of prison life, Mrs Currie struck back. She said no one could understand why Lady Archer – a fellow chemistry student at Oxford University – had gone off with "this little runt ... called Jeffrey Archer".

Mrs Currie branded the disgraced peer a man with no O-levels or A-levels who had "lied through his teeth".

"That's what he's serving his jail sentence for now – perjury," she told BBC Radio Derby. "When she went off with him we couldn't figure out what on earth she saw in him."

Mrs Currie's revenge came a week after her diaries disclosed her four-year relationship with the former Tory Prime Minister.

As the Tories made their way to Bournemouth for this week's party conference, the rumpus surrounding them showed little sign of dying down – a bitter blow for the party's current leader Iain Duncan Smith, who is desperate to move his party away from its reputation for sleaze and hypocrisy.

In a happy coincidence, Mr Major had already opted to stay away from the seaside resort and thanks to fortuitous timing found several thousand miles between himself and Mrs Currie.

With irresistible symbolism, Mr Major's lecture tour of the United States sent him ever further westwards, from one remote time zone to the next, until he ended up last night in a depressed cowtown somewhere in the dusty wilds of California's Central Valley.

But Mr Major's tour, which would otherwise have attracted scant interest, was seized upon by the media pack. A scheduled news conference in Dallas on Wednesday was abandoned as Mrs Currie toured the breakfast television shows lambasting her former lover.

Thursday's speaking engagement in Galveston, Texas, was called off for a different reason – Hurricane Lili was threatening 140mph winds and lashing rain. Unlike Edwina, she didn't deliver.

Yesterday, he was one of the speakers addressing a business leadership summit at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. Sharing the stage with him were experts on missing children and white-collar crime, a broadcast journalist and a comedian. Again, the great affair did not appear to be on the agenda.

That is not to say it passed them by. Don Stephens, the founder and chief executive of the Mercy Ships, which hosted a charity dinner Mr Major attended last week, said it was a time for mercy. "Dame Norma Major forgave her husband ... Mercy, grace and forgiveness are required in all marriages for any number of reasons," he said.

It remains to be seen when Mrs Currie or the British press will agree with him.