Currie kisses 'n' runs as Major tells of 'shame'

John Major finally became interesting yesterday. After a career as the grey man of British politics, Britain woke up to find the former Prime Minister was actually something of a Lothario.

A new book by Edwina Currie, the former Health minister, details a four year-affair with Mr Major, who admitted yesterday he was "most ashamed" of their liaison.

The rest of us, however, were wondering just how we could have misjudged him so badly. A nation that has long associated Mr Major with unglamorous, baggy Y-fronts was suddenly confronted with a somewhat steamier image.

Mrs Currie, who now makes her living writing raunchy novels, has confessed in new diaries published this week to have seduced Mr Major in 1984 and continued the affair until early 1988, when Mr Major became a cabinet minister.

In a statement, Mr Major admitted that the affair was "the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed, and I have long feared it would be made public". His wife, Norma, had known of it for "many years" yet had forgiven him.

Mrs Currie admitted that she had been deeply in love with Mr Major, but said she was "terribly hurt" and "devastated" to have been left out of his Cabinet when he became Prime Minister in 1990.

Last night, neither Mr Major, 61, nor Mrs Currie, 55, was available for further comment. Mrs Currie did not present her weekly Radio 5 Live show, Late Night Currie, last night. The BBC said she had already taken three weeks' leave to avoid the surge of publicity surrounding her revelations. She was reported to have fled to France with her husband, John Jones. Mr Major was understood to be on a lecture tour of the US.

Bernard Ingham, Baroness Thatcher's former press secretary at the time of the affair, said: "There was never any discussion, any hint, any throwaway line or the slightest whiff of this while I worked there."

Jonathan Aitken, a minister in Mr Major's Cabinet before being convicted and jailed for perjury, said: "If it had suddenly come out as a piece of dirty linen being washed in public towards the end of the Major government it would have been a very explosive issue."

The disclosures answer speculation that Mr Major had had an affair. In the early 1990s, he successfully sued the New Statesman and Scallywag magazines for reporting an alleged affair with a caterer, Clare Latimer, who said yesterday: "Personally for me it isn't a shock at all because there is always no smoke without fire. I knew I hadn't had an affair with John Major so I assumed he had had an affair with somebody."