Mary Dejevsky: Welcome to the ways of the boys' club Edwina

It makes you weep. These denizens of the Westminster world powerless to resist the wiles of Edwina

The second that David Mellor allowed the words "cheap trollop" to escape his lips, you knew that the boys' club was in full cry. John Major may have arrived at Westminster as an outsider, always mindful of his humble origins, but he is now a fully paid up member of the club. The US lecture circuit has consigned any money worries he had to the long distant past, and now the lads – adulterers to a man – have gathered around to destroy his one-time mistress.

First, they tried the "woman scorned" pitch, but even they recognised the flawed logic in that. If vengeance was what the lady was after, she could have exacted it to truly devastating effect when he was in Downing Street, exhorting us all to go "Back to Basics". So the boys resorted to charges of mental torture ("I can only shudder at the torment of the damned he must have gone through every time someone else's private life was in the headlines") and avarice ("Basically, she sold John Major down the river for cash...").

Now, we have Peter Clarke, former speechwriter to the late Keith Joseph, who confesses, nay boasts, that Edwina Currie "seduced" him while – as he now discovers – she was already involved with John Major. Let us not speculate whether Mr Clarke is seeking vengeance or money in revealing this unsavoury detail of his past private life. His barely concealed message to the rest of us is that the lady is both "easy" and a "vamp".

It makes you weep, doesn't it? These poor, weak, denizens of the Westminster world, each of them capable of addressing public meetings, dealing with hecklers, canvassing for votes, but powerless to resist the wiles of the raven-haired temptress, Edwina.

For myself, I tend to think that Mrs Currie is telling most of the truth when she says that she wanted to set the record straight. She has never played the woman scorned, à la Sara Keays. As a successful novelist, she hardly needs the money. But as one of relatively few prominent female politicians, she has a story to tell – a story that is worth telling only if she tells all.

Oh yes, I know all about the value of discretion. But what is the use of diaries or memoirs as first-person history if that history is censored? No one is compelled to write, let alone publish, their most intimate thoughts. But if they do, they should be frank. What price our former prime minister's memoirs if he excises (as he did) one of the more colourful chapters of his life, a chapter that casts another light not only on his character and but on the high politics of his day? Not, I venture, a very high price at all – somehow the phrase "cheap trollop" comes to mind.

It is only a matter of time now, before the final and most damning of the boys' club accusations comes Mrs Currie's way: condescending dismissal. The good lady, they will say, has really said nothing at all – nothing that matters, that is – and we should all just go back to those other basics of political life: adulterous affairs in the Westminster hothouse and the sooner we British hypocrites stop obsessing about it and turn a Continental blind eye, the better.

To the extent that John and Edwina are history and the Major government, too, this is true. There is nothing in Mrs Currie's diaries that is of current political significance. There is no reason whatsoever for the Tories to reopen old wounds on the eve of their conference, nor for Labour politicians to gloat during theirs. For all the elegant timing of their publication, the Currie diaries make no difference at all to the political balance today.

They should, however, change the way we regard John Major. The adultery comes a far distant second to what we now must now recognise as cynical hypocrisy in the way he implemented "Back to Basics" and dismissed minister after minister who crossed the line. What was that David Mellor was saying about "torment of the damned"? He could have rejected the policy or resigned.

The Currie diaries should also change the way we regard the Major years, both the years of his political rise and the years of his premiership. Affairs, clandestine ones included, invariably affect more people than just the two individuals involved and their immediate families. They have a pernicious effect that spreads, invisibly, far wider. There will be many in and out of government at the time who will now look back and ask whether their lives or prospects were damaged by a secret that skewed otherwise straightforward calculations.

They will ask whether, perhaps, confidences passed to one or other of the lovers might have been breached in pillow-talk – to the detriment of their own private life or career. They will ask whether the relationship gave Edwina an influence on government policy that exceeded her lowly standing as an MP and junior minister. Clare Latimer, as the Downing Street caterer who denied allegations of an affair with Mr Major, won a lawsuit, but saw her reputation damaged nonetheless, deserves to feel particularly aggrieved.

We can all delight in the colour tint that Edwina's revelation has added to the greyness of John Major. But to dismiss the affair as her problem not his, is to swallow the "boys' club" line that the harm lies in the revelation, not the affair. It does matter, it needed to be recorded – and some people, perhaps a lot of people, were hurt.

mdejevsky@independent.co.uk