Political Lovers & Scallywags: Norma and I... in bed.

I do feel sorry for any woman named Edwina right now. It is official: John Major & Edwina Currie were lovers. In an interview with The Times' Ginny Dougary, Currie says, "What you need to remember, Ginny, is that politicians admire the element of the devious in each other. It is essential in order for someone to rise that they have some streak of ruthlessness in their character. And he had it. He had it."

Major won a libel suit against two magazines that had reported he was having an affair, forcing one out of business. The magazines that Major sued are likely to now sue him back. Lawyers for the publisher and the estate of the editor of Scallywag magazine, which went out of business after having to pay the financial damages awarded in the suit, say that although the magazine named the wrong woman in the affair, Mr Major's claim not to be 'an adulterer is wholly hollow.' The publishers of the New Statesman, 'crippled' by the suit, are also thinking of taking legal action against Major.

And the woman mistakenly named in those reports, Clare Latimer, now says she believes Major used her as a decoy. She expressed her bitterness to Times reporter Richard Ford, saying Major 'allowed my life to be crashed because he knew this allegation (of a relationship with her) was not true and to hide the real scandal that he was so terrified might come out.'

Once upon a major time faced with his career-breaking secret being stacked up on tables at WH Smith, Major responded with what can now be acknowledged as one of the most lethal ex-lover's put-downs in history, saying of Currie's novel: "Norma and I are reading it in bed and fighting over it", a phrase in which the invisibly italicised words are Norma and I... in bed.

In 30 years time Dr Watsons of political biographies are likely to dare to elaborate on whether any naughty characters had bothered to sleep with our belovered Paul Keating when he was in POWER.

Is there a way out of this mess? A few Mark Twain quotes on parliament and congress might help:

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography; also in Mark Twain in Eruption

Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.
- Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878