EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: John Major's fling with Edwina gets TV revisit

EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: John Major’s fling with Edwina gets TV revisit

John Major won’t thank Channel 5 for reminding viewers of his four-year affair with Edwina Currie. 

In a forthcoming documentary entitled Yes, Yes, Yes, Prime Minister he is accused of hypocrisy over his 1993 ‘back to basics’ speech five years after his infidelity. 

But odium is reserved for Currie by ex-MP Ann Widdecombe, who describes her 2002 disclosure of the liaison as ‘yuk, yuk’, accusing her of betrayal.

‘I still am shocked by people who betray others years down the line,’ she barks. 

Currie famously praised Major’s gentlemanly behaviour, sitting at the tap end during romantic shared baths.

Could the plight of Kuti Miah, owner of the Southampton waterfront Indian brasserie where the teenage Rishi waited tables, be a grim omen for the PM? Kuti, who describes Sunak as ‘very talented, very nice and very human’, may have to close. ‘All the electricity has gone up, gas has gone up, we cannot pass it on to our customers,’ he says. ‘In 42 years this is the hardest time I am going through ever.’

What will Rishi do if Liz says she would prefer the red benches to the green after her blink-and-you-miss-it Downing Street stint? No ex-prime minister has sat in the Lords since Margaret Thatcher. Edward Heath and Winston Churchill declined the honour. Only seven of the late Queen’s 15 prime ministers were raised to the peerage. Baroness Truss of Kamikaze may have to wait a while.

Bewigged Tory backbencher Michael Fabricant proudly announces he turned down three lucrative offers from ITV to appear on I’m A Celebrity… adding: ‘They did say to me, ‘You could just do the programme for a week… go on and be obnoxious on the first programme and you’ll be voted off straight away’.’ How many bad hair days could Michael survive in the jungle?

Gabby Logan, packing her factor 50 sunscreen for Qatar, admits to a sturdy constitution, describing an outing with her pets: ‘I was hungry. I’d just been for a facial, and the shop next door was a luxury pet shop in Chelsea. They had these biscuits I bought for my dogs. But I got caught in traffic on the way home. So I thought, I’m going to have a biscuit. And then I had six.’ Qatar’s exotic dishes of machboos and saloona will hold no challenges for Gabby, pictured.

Author Kate Mosse, celebrating forgotten achievements of women in history, tells the Petworth Literary Festival that a plaque at Bristol Cathedral marking the first ordination of women priests in 1994 had to be replaced when it was observed that it named the men who did the ordaining but not any of the women. To rub it in, the trailblazing priests had each been asked to contribute £15 towards it.

When Emma Manners met her future husband David he presented her with a card embossed with ‘Marquess of Granby’. ‘I thought he might own a pub,’ she recalls. Now she’s the Duchess of Rutland living in Belvoir Castle. Fancy!

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