.. This stuff gave me horrible, horrible dreams for months afterwards. There is detail, there is too much detail — and then there are Currie’s diaries. ..
-
.. This stuff gave me horrible, horrible dreams for months afterwards. There is detail, there is too much detail — and then there are Currie’s diaries. ..
-
Edwina curry
This RoD Liddle story made me laugh
Edwina Currie: the gift that keeps on giving. Long after we had expected the former minister to shut up and go away, she is still howling about past injustices. Her latest batch of diaries are now being serialised.
Her last batch remain in my memory for two reasons: first, for the clinical way in which she described the precise chemical composition of her own flatus after she’d eaten a dodgy egg (hydrogen sulphide, if I remember correctly.) And second, for her description of how she felt the morning after a tryst with the former prime minister, John Major — very happy, apparently, and “sticky”.
This stuff gave me horrible, horrible dreams for months afterwards. There is detail, there is too much detail — and then there are Currie’s diaries. Her latest effusions will, I think, prove to be just as memorable.
I suspect you will be unsurprised to learn that, when weighing up the relative merits of John Major’s ministers, she considers all of them vile and useless, except for one — Edwina Currie — whom she believes to be both brilliant and staggeringly attractive.
Rather than take issue with this judgment, let me hand you over to Currie for some of that famous detail. Ann Widdecombe is described as “hideous”, and she comments: “The milk of human kindness never flowed inside those enormous breasts.” Lovely. Thanks for that.
Widdecombe’s nemesis, Michael Howard, is dismissed as “oily”, Michael Portillo as “very unpleasant” and the former chancellor Norman Lamont as “arrogant” and “unpleasant” with “little sly eyes and a small, wet, mobile mouth like a predatory but lazy fish”. I love the way she got “lazy” in: it is not enough for Lamont to be simply unpleasant and arrogant; he has to be lazy too.
Her bile is both imaginative and infinite. Ken Clarke, mind, is also “lazy” and, further, possesses “the political nous of a three-year-old”. Stephen Dorrell looks “tired” and is obviously “out of his depth” at the Treasury.
Lots of people have flung insults at both the rightish John Redwood and the even more rightish financier and founder of the Referendum party, the late Sir James Goldsmith. Currie, though, opts for brevity by describing both as “a pair of wankers”. She does have some kind words, though, for the fragrant Virginia Bottomley, whom she asserts is a very tough lady indeed and probable future leadership material. However, Currie mitigates this judgment with the postscript: “Such a shame that I can’t stand her.”
Poor Gillian Shephard is given a kicking for the crime of looking a little bit like Edwina Currie, except not quite as foxy. Furious that Shephard has been elevated above her in a reshuffle, Currie rages like a scouse banshee that has just been told its haunting days are over. “What’s she ever done?” she howls. “When has she stuck her neck out, made a great speech, made her mark on the nation? Answer: she hasn’t.” Rather mystifyingly, Currie then announces she “likes” Shephard, despite apparently considering her a witless nonentity and an Edwina wannabe. This is how it is to be liked by Edwina Currie.
But what of John Major, the prime minister? The sentence that will stick in my mind the longest is this: “His face, as they say, bears the imprint of whoever last sat on it.” Given what we know about the relationship between the two of them, this little nugget conjures up a vision so shudderingly awful that I feel guilty foisting it on you on a Sunday morning. I will never be able to look at a photograph of Major again without trying, subconsciously, to make out Currie’s imprint. I really wish she hadn’t written that sentence. It’s right up there with the stickiness and the hydrogen sulphide.
Currie, meanwhile, is of course talented and imaginative and witty and also “looks stunning in Balenciaga and Ungaro and Karl Lagerfeld”. She is, in her own mind, a brilliant and voluptuous siren brought down by pygmies for the crime of having a fantastic mind of her own.
I think this is a few yards short of the truth, if I’m honest. But you can’t help but like the woman.
Leave a comment: