JOHN & EDWINA: A LOVE TORY: WHAT DID I EVER SEE IN HER?

EDWINA Currie last night heaped fresh humiliation on John Major and his wife Norma as she spoke about her three-hour sex sessions with the former Prime Minister.

She said Major was "a considerate and skilled lover" and that after one particularly steamy session, she turned to him and said: "That was some going".

She reveals how she made coded references to Major as "B" and to their secret sex sessions as "exercise" in notes for her explosive diaries.

"Edwina rated John very highly as a lover," said one source.

Mrs Currie last night revealed how she and Major became lovers after the Tory Party Conference in November 1984.

She says he had "teased and upset" her, but they went back to her office and embraced before returning to her London flat and beginning the affair.

As Mrs Currie's revelations rocked Britain's political world, John Major broke his silence in a dramatic phone call to his sister Pat Dessoy.

The ex-Premier, who told his sister "My God, what did I ever see in her?" after he ended the affair, spoke to her from Chicago, where he is on a US lecture tour. The Sunday Mirror was with Pat Dessoy as she took the call.

He told her he was "very concerned" about his wife Norma, who was "upset, angry and humiliated".

At her home in Worcester Park, Surrey, Pat said: "John, like all of us, is very worried about how this is going to affect Norma, who is dreadfully upset. If anyone is going to suffer it is going to be Norma. "It's been so humiliating for her."

Friends revealed that Norma was so devastated by the four-year affair, which ended in early 1988, that the couple twice considered divorce.

Major said in an official statement yesterday that his wife "had long forgiven him" for the "one event in my life of which I am most ashamed".

And sister Pat angrily dismissed Mrs Currie's claims that SHE broke off their relationship as his political career began to take off.

Major told Pat at the time: "Edwina started the affair, I broke it off."

Pat said: "John ended it, then he had the guts to tell Norma. He was quite sure that he wanted to go back to Norma. He knew Edwina wasn't worth it."

Pat said the affair was never a "full-blown regular relationship". She said: "It was an on-off thing over those four years.

"The family have known for ages. He confessed to Norma at the time and it has long since been forgotten by everyone except for him worrying about it coming out. They sorted it out between themselves and that's all that matters."

Allies of the Majors say they seriously considered splitting up in 1989 and 1991, but Norma agreed to stay and make the marriage work for the sake of her husband's career.

One source close to Major condemned Mrs Currie's decision to go public about the affair as "the ultimate act of revenge of a scorned woman".

The source said: "I think Edwina always felt betrayed that John never gave her a job as a Cabinet Minister."

Last night it emerged that she may have been right. According to another senior Tory, at the same time he was having sex with her Major BLOCKED her promotion from the backbenches.

As a Government whip he replied to a letter from the then Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph, who suggested Mrs Currie should be a Minister, by saying: "We know her talent for publicity but she is not suited to being a Minister."

Mrs Currie says the affair began after the couple struck up a close friendship during the long, late-night sittings at the House of Commons.

Sister Pat explains: "John was in his 40s, and living in London. His wife was a long way away in Huntingdon and the children were at school so Norma couldn't come to London very often."

"John's career was not going too well at the time and he was looking for sympathy. A woman like Edwina Currie will always find someone. I'm not sure what attracted John to her and I wouldn't dream of asking him. The two of them had common political interests and there was a sexual attraction."

The affair was a ruthlessly guarded secret. They told just one colleague, former Commons Leader Tony Newton.

They shared romantic meals in and around Westminster, but suspicions were not aroused because both had duties in the same department and they frequently had to meet to discuss Commons business. But the affair ended as Major's political career began to take off.

And when he became Prime Minister in 1990 and failed to give her a Cabinet job Mrs Currie said she was "terribly, terribly hurt and completely bewildered".

"I felt like I'd been pushed off in a boat adrift at sea."

Now a BBC radio presenter and author, she said one of the most hurtful things was when she read Major's autobiography and found she did not even rate a mention in the index.

She defended her decision to reveal the relationship, saying: "All these things are a very long time ago."

But she admitted she had never confessed the affair to her first husband Ray, who she married in 1972 and divorced only last year.

Pat Dessoy, meanwhile, is scornful of Mrs Currie's decision to go public.

"What sort of person writes a book and uses details of an affair as a highlight of that book? Mrs Currie writes books about sex - disgusting books," she said.

"John came to his senses. He ended it because he realised how stupid he had been and how important his marriage and the children were."

Colleagues speculated at the time that the marriage was not entirely happy.

Norma was rarely seen at Westminster or at Mr Major's side at big political events. At the time it was thought that she simply did not share her husband's liking for politics and Westminster.

But unknown to Norma, Major was considered a ladies' man by some colleagues.

Although he was known as the Grey Man of British politics during his seven-year reign as PM, former Tory MP Jerry Hayes, said: "Women loved him. Some of us always saw him as a very sexual animal.

"It was something most men didn't detect but women felt it and Edwina obviously fell for it."

Senior Tories at the heart of John Major's administration said last night that the revelations could have brought down his Government - especially after he launched his "Back to Basics" campaign stressing family values in 1993.

Ex-Tory MP Michael Brown, who resigned as a minister over allegations of a gay affair, said: "There might never have been a John Major premiership."

And disgraced former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken said: "If it had come out as a piece of dirty linen towards the end of the Major government it would have been a very explosive issue."

Yesterday Mrs Currie was in hiding. She left her French holiday home near Saumur in the morning and it is now being rented out to two couples from Devon.

But last night former Tory colleagues were recalling a telling outburst she made at the time of the party's "Back to Basics" move.

Mrs Currie launched a ferocious attack on the initiative, dismissing it as "absolute humbug" and adding: "Somebody should have said to John, 'Before you start a morality campaign, just run the slide rule past your 100 or so ministers'.""

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