Major 'ready to lie' in adultery libel trial

FORMER Prime Minister John Major was prepared to lie on oath to cover up his adulterous past, it was claimed last night.

Legal papers relating to Major’s court action against the magazine Scallywag over its claim that he had an affair with caterer Clare Latimer suggest he had assured his lawyers that he had never committed adultery.

The accusations could prove costly for the former premier, who was last week forced to admit he had an affair with Tory colleague Edwina Currie, which finished five years before the action was settled, netting him some 27,000 in damages, in 1993.

They will also add to the turmoil besetting the Conservatives as they prepare for a taxing conference in Bournemouth this week.

The potentially explosive legal documents are likely to feature as a central plank in the arguments of both Scallywag and the New Statesman – which repeated the allegations about Latimer – which are both set to sue Major to recover their costs and damages.

The documents reveal the full extent of Major’s efforts to cover up his adultery with Currie and the gamble he was prepared to take with his reputation and his position as Prime Minister in order to win the case.

If the magazines had called his bluff and taken the case to trial, the documents suggest Major would have had to perjure himself by denying any affair.

The first question any defence lawyer would have asked was whether Major had had an adulterous relationship during his political career.

The papers show Major gave a personal assurance to lawyers that he had not had any adulterous affair.

One letter, dated August 17, 1993, from his lawyers, Biddle & Co, demanded that the magazines would not publish any statements suggesting Major “has had adulterous relationships with a number of women, including Clare Latimer”.

The legal papers say that words used by the magazines in certain articles were meant to mean that “the plaintiff’s (Major’s) defence of the former Tory Minister David Mellor, when he was exposed as an adulterer, was improperly influenced by the fact that he himself was an adulterer.”

The papers also says that one magazine issue “alleges that the Prime Minister had an adulterous relationship” and other articles “allege that the PM is, and has been, pursuing another adulterous relationship... These charges are wholly untrue and damaging and distressing to the Prime Minister and his family for reasons that are self-evident. The Prime Minister is not prepared to leave these serious libels unchallenged.” The magazines later backed down after receiving assurances from Major’s lawyers that he had not had any adulterous relationship.

The Major affair is now threatening to cast a long shadow over the make-or-break Conservative party conference for present leader Ian Duncan Smith. Today, the Conservative leader faces another onslaught from other Tory grandees.

In a newspaper interview Michael Heseltine joins colleagues, including Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Kenneth Clarke, in questioning the performance of the new leader.

“He has to go,” Heseltine is reported to have told friends, in a withering verdict on Duncan Smith’s efforts to rouse his moribund party. “He is the problem. He’s making no impact. The whole thing starts at the top and if it doesn’t start there, it doesn’t start. Full stop.”

But Duncan Smith has come out fighting with a high-profile attack on the “broken pledges” of the last Tory prime minister’s seven years in power. In a pre-conference interview he says: “Spending went through the roof, taxes started to rise, and the result of all that – and the Exchange Rate Mechanism – is that we put real tightness on everyone.