Politics or pants?

So the nation gasped at the big blue underpants, powerful women went weak at the memory of Prime Minister Major, the knives came out for Edwina Currie. But surely that's the end of the affair? Not so, says Andy McSmith. Like the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, the story will haunt Iain Duncan Smith at next week's Tory conference

History is full of people whose sexual behaviour was atrocious, yet who performed great services for their country. The great White House adulterer Bill Clinton, for example. The ecstatic reception given to Slick Willie at the Labour Party last week matched the opinion polls, which tell us the modern public attaches no importance to the sexual peccadilloes of our politicians.

So scuttlebutt about John Major's big blue underpants should not make any difference to the Conservative Party Conference, which starts tomorrow. It shouldn't, but it will – partly because it will reinforce a general prejudice that the Tories are terrible hypocrites.

Just when Iain Duncan Smith was struggling to revive the Conservative Party's credibility as the champion of family values, and to impugn the Government's "moral neutrality", we have been treated to a big, blue reminder of just how these people behaved when they were in power.

Margaret Thatcher was obsessed by the thought that teenage pregnancies and sponging off the state went hand in hand. In her memoirs, she remembered becoming "convinced" that "we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating on strengthening the traditional family". Her famous statement that "there is no such thing as society" was her way of encouraging people to fall back on their relatives.

One method was to cut any welfare payments which might encourage young girls to become pregnant to secure an income from the state. In this, John Major was her willing assistant. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he froze child benefit for two years, a harsh move which almost provoked the resignation of the Secretary of State for Social Security, John Moore. It also helped to finance the huge tax reductions for high earners announced in the budget of March 1988.

In that same month, Edwina Currie, then a junior health minister, did her own spectacular bit towards improving the nation's moral health. "The strongest piece of advice I could give to any young woman is: don't screw around and don't smoke," she pronounced.

Her diaries for the period, published last week, make only a passing reference to this campaign to improve the sexual behaviour of young women – but in the entry for 20 March 1988 we learn that she was finally doing something about her own, by sending a note to John Major ending their illicit, four-year-long relationship.

"So why did I start?" she laments. "Because I was unhappy with a husband forever slumped snoring in front of the television, not helpful or interested in what I was trying to do. I needed a friend."

Mrs Currie had complained before about her unsatisfactory husband. "Non-political spouses don't understand our love affairs with politics ... I remember B saying his wife was the same ..." says an earlier diary entry, for August 1987. B was her chosen code letter for John Major, of course, as much of the nation now knows.

While she and the future Prime Minister were compensating each other for their marital disappointments, Mrs Currie took it upon herself to discourage British businessmen from going down the same path. In 1987, before the end of her own affair, she suggested they take their wives with them on trips abroad, to ward off temptation from local girls. With reference to the Aids epidemic, she remarked insouciantly: "Good Christian people who wouldn't dream of misbehaving will not catch Aids."

This may have been intended as an intervention to protect the health of the nation, but sounded very like a bossy Conservative telling men to keep their trousers on.

It could be, of course, that she had learnt to identify with those women picked up by cheating husbands. Her own first attempt to find solace with an unnamed lover ended when he "turned out to be a right slob, with some kinky preferences and a selfishness of such magnitude as I've never met before".

And even John Major, who began by being "so bloody nice and so attractive" eventually became a source of grief: "He started to touch, but I couldn't cope with it and got a bit upset and tried rather tearfully to explain that he must not mess me about. Either we're on and he must come and find time to come ... or we are not on and he mustn't tempt me. Oh! The quicker I get him out of my hair, the better. Soon, I hope."

When John Major launched his 1993 "Back to Basics' campaign (which Mrs Currie now tells us was an "evil" thing to do) he did not mean it to be about sexual morality. Unfortunately, he was surrounded by people who did.

His spin-doctor Tim Collins, now a shadow minister, put that gloss on it when he briefed journalists ahead of the speech. Immediately afterwards, John Redwood and Peter Lilley, two of the cabinet ministers Mr Major regarded as "bastards", resumed the Thatcherite campaign against welfare-scrounging unmarried mothers. Eventually, it took Kenneth Clarke to declare that Back to Basics had been "hijacked' and that women did not become pregnant "after consulting their welfare rights officer".

When the Conservative Party was strong, it could simultaneously lecture the country on morality and ride out its own sex scandals. During the period when Mr Major and Mrs Currie were having their affair, Jeffrey Archer was forced to resign from his post as the party's Deputy Chairman over the involvement with a prostitute which ultimately landed him in jail. That and other sex scandals did not prevent the Tories from triumphantly winning the 1987 general election.

But now they are still deep in the malaise which began 10 years ago, with no sign of improvement. Last week, they lost another MP when Andrew Hunter switched allegiance to the Democratic Unionists, bringing the number of Tory MPs down to 165 – exactly where they were after the electoral thrashing of May 1997.

After a year in office, Mr Duncan Smith is past the honeymoon period for a new leader. His personal opinion poll rating is lower than that of Charles Kennedy and he is grappling with the kind of rebelliousness and back-stabbing that usually besets an opposition leader whose party is flatlining. His main source of trouble comes not from the left of the party, which still looks to Kenneth Clarke as its leader, but from a split in the right between the "mods", who follow Michael Portillo's libertarian agenda, and the "rockers", who prefer the old Thatcherite recipe of free-market economics and reactionary social policies.

The libertarians can claim to be closer to mainstream public opinion, which is more tolerant in matters of sexuality than it was when Baroness Thatcher was young. However, they do not reflect majority opinion in the Tory party, and certainly not among the faithful who will gather in Bournemouth this week.

During last year's leadership election, The Daily Telegraph warned that Michael Portillo would be an unsuitable leader because he has no children, whereas Duncan Smith is a family man. That seems to have accurately reflected the prejudices of paid-up Conservatives, whose average age at the time was 67. Tories who have had to resign from the government for cheating on their wives – Cecil Parkinson in 1983, David Mellor in 1992, and Tim Yeo in 1994 – were not sacked by the prime minister of the day, but were eventually forced out by pressure from scandalised party activists.

Despite being elected as a "rocker", Mr Duncan Smith has pleased the "mods" by the issues on which he has chosen to fight Labour. He has tried to invent a new form of what he calls "Compassionate Conservatism" which addresses itself to difficult issues such as the state of public services, and social deprivation.

Last month alone, there were three well-publicised events in this campaign to give a social dimension to his "Compassionate Conservatism': a speech by Mr Duncan Smith on the five evils besetting contemporary society, including crime and child poverty; another by David Willetts, one of the Shadow Cabinet's leading intellectuals, in which he tried to demonstrate why a restless, sexually active thirtysomething like Bridget Jones could be a Tory voter; and a book edited by the party's vice chairman, Gary Streeter, with the provocative title There is Such a Thing as Society.

All three tried to give a modern slant to the old notion that the Conservative Party is the party of the family.

Mr Duncan Smith started from a position usually taken by Labour politicians, that crime and social disintegration can be attributed to the poor conditions under which children are brought up. To distinguish his message from Labour's, he accused the Government of having only one solution: to use the levers of the state to direct money at the problem of child poverty. Mr Duncan Smith claimed that it is not all a question of money.

"Children are essentially the same in every time and every place," he said. "Deeper than their material needs is a hunger for identity and security, to be part of a loving home. The state cannot provide that home."

Mr Willetts, in his "Bridget Jones" speech, was trying to make the point that a modern Conservative does not condemn women for trying out a few different sexual partners before settling down – if their ultimate aim is a stable marriage. However, the speech's central message was that "we should not inadvertently, or even worse, deliberately undermine marriage".

It is unlikely that anyone on Duncan Smith's front bench would now be so crass as to tell young women not to "screw around", but it is becoming part of the Conservative mission to remind people that they must think about what they are doing before they bring children into the world.

Gary Streeter, in the introduction to his book, observed: "Our instincts are to allow people the freedom to choose how they live, provided they do not harm others. But where there are children involved, should we not be encouraging the protection and stability their young lives so desperately need?"

This was not something the Tories were discussing as an aside – it was deliberately chosen as their main message at the end of IDS's first year. The culmination should have been this week's party conference, and the leader's speech on Thursday. Except that now, poor Mr Duncan Smith is facing the risk that if he mentions marriage, or the family, or Tony Blair's "moral neutrality', his message will be suffocated under John Major's big blue underpants.

'Charismatic, charming' – what women say about Major

Ann Leslie, writer

An octopus arm had sneaked round my waist and someone behind me had begun gently kissing my ear. I then realised – to my embarrassment but not particularly to his – that the octopus arm and the ear-nibbling lips belonged to the Prime Minister.

Penny Junor, Major's biographer

You'd be hard pushed to find a more colourful and charismatic man. For a start, he is over 6ft tall, and broad, with a huge grin and impeccable manners. When he shakes your hand he holds it longer than normal, and very often cups his left hand round yours to encase it fully. He looks you in the eye, and asks questions as if he really wants to know the answer. He is charming, he's funny, he is relaxed and friendly – flirtatious even – and he obviously likes women and treats them very much as equals.

Teresa Gorman, former MP

He was very gentle and then he started rubbing the side of my hand with his thumb.

Cristina Odone, deputy editor of the New Statesman

He seemed to relish female company. Not only mine, but that of the waitresses and producers as well: on each and every one he turned a beam of a gaze, a huge grin, and all in all conveyed his pleasure in their presence. By the time I'd finished my scrambled eggs, I found myself feeling, as Lord Gowrie famously said of Edwina Currie, a bat-squeak of desire.

Lynda Lee-Potter, columnist

John Major was the late surprise baby of a mother who adored him. He could do no wrong in her eyes so he's always felt more confident and relaxed with females than with men. Women fancy him because he's sexy, tactile, admiring and a sympathetic listener.

Baroness Nicholson, former Tory minister

It was so naff, stupid and shallow. My husband, Michael, was shocked. I am a professional woman. Nothing like that had happened to me before. If it had been a passing comment I would have laughed it off. But he called me into his office just to ask me about my perfume.

Pat Dessoy, Major's sister

At least it wasn't Ann Widdecombe. That really would have been a mistake.

Jean Kierans, a former lover

He was the love of my life. It makes me laugh when I hear him called a grey man; that's just a cover.