Major's tour blown off course by Currie storm and hurricane Lili
By Tim Reid in Dallas and Tom Baldwin
timesonline.co.uk
JOHN MAJOR and Edwina Currie came out of the shadows yesterday for the first time since the disclosure of their four-year love affair. But while Mrs Currie embarked on a frenzied round of interviews, the former Prime Minister remained resolutely silent on their relationship.
Mr Major landed in Dallas for the latest engagement on an American lecture tour to find the city under siege from the media. He cancelled a press conference and reporters and photographers were barred from the 500-plate black-tie charity dinner at which he was guest of honour. Mr Major arrived at the Fairmont Hotel in a stretch limousine with blacked-out windows and was whisked into an underground car park.
Mr Major was in Dallas to promote the Mercy Ships charity of which he and his wife are patrons. Its executives had promised that he would comment on his personal life at the press conference, but Mr Major pulled out and his spokesman said that he had never intended to discuss personal matters or to add to the statement he gave The Times last week.
In that statement, Mr Major described his affair with Mrs Currie as the event in his life of which he was most ashamed. He spoke after Mrs Currie disclosed details of the affair in her diaries, which have been serialised in The Times. Today’s excerpt deals with her resignation as Health Minister over the salmonella in eggs controversy and with her hopes of returning to government.
In America yesterday, Mr Major’s former parliamentary secretary, Lord McColl, prepared to take over the chair at the Mercy Ships press conference, but in the end the whole event was called off because of the media scrum. Lord McColl said: “The place has been besieged and bugged. Things have happened so fast and we are shell-shocked.”
Mr Major’s tour, which began in New York last week, was further disrupted by hurricane Lili, which is blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. Cities in the south of Texas have been evacuated and Mr Major is expected to have to cancel a visit to Houston he had planned for today.
Mrs Currie was far less bashful yesterday as she did the rounds of the television and radio studios before delivering a lecture at Nottingham Writers’ Club.
She used her interviews to launch a blistering attack on her former lover, who declined to offer her a senior post in his Government. She accused him of behaving “atrociously” and described the ill-fated “Back to Basics” campaign as “evil”.
Mrs Currie spoke of the “burden” of her affair and her need to “set the picture straight”. She said she could have brought down the Government had she disclosed the affair when Mr Major was Prime Minister. But now, after two landslide defeats, there was no Tory party left to damage. “I think the worst thing that ever happened, for which he was entirely responsible, was ‘Back to Basics’. I thought that was evil, really rotten, really cruel, and it was then open house on the way that his ministers had been behaving.”
As she spoke, Mr Major was keeping everyone guessing in America. The security for his tour was tight from the start, but since Mrs Currie made their relationship public his movements have been surrounded by the kind of secrecy one would expect were President Bush to visit Baghdad.
Diane Rickard, who works for the Mercy Ships, said his personal security had been expanded in the light of the sudden press interest: “Nobody will tell us where he is coming from, or where he is going.”
Mr Major has so far visited Chicago and Milwaukee and is due to conclude the tour in California on Saturday. Now his planned visit to Houston on behalf of the Mercy Ships today has been thrown into doubt, not by Mrs Currie but by Hurricane Lili. “We can’t quite believe it,” Lord McColl said. “We’re very disappointed by the whole thing.” |
