Am I the cause of Edwina's wrath? "The most hurtful thing is to look at John's autobiography and find that I wasn't even in the index," she said at the weekend. Yesterday, caller after caller to BBC 5 Live shared her outrage. I listened with a sinking heart. The omission that so upset her was an accident, and it was almost certainly my fault.
I spent two years working with and for John Major on his autobiography. My role and title were never defined - I was no ghostwriter; he was a hands-on author - but I got to know him as well as many and thought, until last weekend, that there was little that could come out now that would surprise me.
After all, I had researched his career and questioned his colleagues. I'd met his family. I'd fed his prized koi carp in the pond at his house in Huntingdon. He'd brought me tea in bed and made me bacon sandwiches. Day after day in his big, Commons office, high above the Thames, I'd sit with him on the Pugin sofas, trying to spot what he'd missed from the book's first draft or what wasn't clear and prompting him to tell me more. I thought I'd nudged him into filling every gap. Usually it worked. Major has always been a skilled storyteller with a catchy turn of phrase. And he liked gossip.
One of the names I mentioned, as he sipped herbal tea and tried to remember events that were already a decade old, was Edwina Currie. My question was innocent and I didn't expect him to say much. But she was a famous Tory character and politically they had been close; it seemed worth raising. Both had been ambitious footsoldiers in the Thatcher revolution. I asked if he had anything to recount. He did. What he said was supposed to be in the book: a friendly word and a nice tale about a woman who had stood out from the political crowd. Until I looked yesterday, I thought it was there.
So, I suspect, did John Major. The story wasn't much - an anecdote about the impact she'd made when she became a junior health minister. Edwina hadn't liked her fellow ministers smoking and she'd urged them to eat healthy meals. In the hearty, Tory, male atmosphere of the mid-80s that made her different. As he told me the undramatic tale Major sounded fond, but no fonder of her than of any other politicians.
Somehow, the story didn't make it into the final text. Perhaps I cut it in a last-minute edit: the book was already too long. Perhaps the passage simply got lost among a flurry of revisions. Major's cupboards were bursting with piles of A4 paper, filled with his tight, almost unreadable handwriting and covered in corrections, additions and deletions and we had to produce a book in a hurry. Whatever the cause, Currie was overlooked. What followed is history.
The revelation will have astounded almost all who knew him - and I spoke to scores of them. Undoubtedly there was an exotic side to his life and the views he expressed were often at the liberal end of the spectrum - at the start of his autobiography Major recalls how he uncovered his secret half-brother and half-sister and concludes that "life in Britain has never been simple and never will be".
But Major's own family life had seemed conventional. It was unfairly caricatured: John and Norma at home eating peas on a plate. But truth gave the caricature bite. Major really was at home in Huntingdon, and uneasy in London. As prime minister he preferred his own house to Chequers. He watched television. He was a better father than most politicians.
Some commentators have asked how real Major's marriage was and suggested that the couple might have kept up appearances for the cameras. That was not my impression and I saw them often enough. Major was and is devoted to Norma. Currie was mistaken if she thought otherwise. I had the impression from John and Norma that each knew the other very well and that there was a strong mutual dependence. Without Norma's love, Major would never have been prime minister and he knew it.
But there is more to Major than the conventional family man, the man who, as Andrew Rawnsley once put it, "ran away from the circus to join a troop of accountants". He had a gambling streak - Currie's revelations prove it, but so did his decision to stand down and fight for the leadership in 1995.
And he had a physical warmth which both men and women noticed and responded to. Taller than expected, better dressed and better looking, he dominates any room he enters and always has. It is a trick that made him prime minister and has now made him an unexpected star of the business lecture circuit. You always feel he likes you and is taking you into his confidence. And he genuinely does - on most things.
But we now know that behind that apparent openness there is a man who can keep a secret better than anyone else at Westminster. That might seem odd to an outsider. But a prime minister is by nature a keeper of secrets. The job involves much that can never be discussed with others, about the royal family, intelligence and your colleagues. Major simply extended this discretion to his own life.
No normal person becomes a politician, but Major is more unusual than most. His confidence is fed by personal contact, often physical. He puts his arm around the shoulders of people he has only just met, or his hand on their knee. Women may think he is flirting. But the behaviour is subconscious and extends to men as much as women. It has more to do with his need both to reassure and be reassured than anything else.
It is easy to see how something might have started quite innocently. And when he met Currie his life was changing fast. Suddenly he was working late at night in London and did not always have time to return to Huntingdon. His life was being taken over by things that only made sense to other politicians. Major was not the first MP to stray as a result.
But Norma's absence from London did not mean her absence from his life. Later, as prime minister, when she kept her home in Huntingdon rather than Number 10, some speculated on the state of their relationship. One very senior and close ally of Major has privately remarked that for Norma to base herself at Huntingdon was "not kind". He meant not kind to a prime minister under fire. This shows a complete lack of understanding of Norma and John, for when he is under fire he retreats to Huntingdon.
How will he be feeling? My guess is that he will be 99% mortified and 1% amused at his own folly. He has always enjoyed episodes that undermine that tiresome caricature of the grey prime minister. He will also be railing against the reporting of the affair, not least to complain that his back to basics campaign has been misunderstood as one about sexual morality. He always meant it to be about bread-and-butter issues such as education.
I never asked him whether there was anything embarrassing or disgraceful in his life which ought to go into (or be kept out of) his book. Perhaps I should have. Had I done so and had he given me a full reply I would have urged him to mention the affair. Surely he knew that Currie would do so in the end. But Major's complex character includes an almost Victorian sense of dignity. His comments yesterday about his shame at the affair were foolish because they understandably hurt Currie and provoked her still further. But they were genuine, I am sure of that.
· Julian Glover is the editor of GuardianUnlimited politics.
