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Edwina Currie

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Edwina Currie

Edwina Currie Jones née Cohen, (born 13 October 1946) is a former British Member of Parliament.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Currie was born in Liverpool to a Jewish family. A pupil at The Belvedere School and Liverpool Institute High School for Girls, she studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Anne's College, Oxford University; subsequently, she took a Master's degree in economic history at the London School of Economics.

[edit] Career

From 1975 to 1986 she served as a Birmingham City Councillor. In 1983 she stood for parliament as a member of the Conservative Party, and was elected as the member for South Derbyshire.

In 1986, she became a Junior Health Minister, but was forced to resign in 1988 after she issued a warning about salmonella in British eggs that was criticised for being hysterical and over-cautious. After continually reiterating that a majority of British eggs were infected with salmonella her position came into jeopardy. The amount of eggs infected by salmonella was actually a minority, so when Margaret Thatcher stated "I had eggs for breakfast", this killed Currie's career. In the 1997 general election she lost her parliamentary seat. For five years (1998–2003) she hosted a successful late-evening talk show on BBC Radio Five Live; previous achievements in the media included being, in 1991, the first Conservative MP to appear on the BBC topical panel show Have I Got News For You. She subsequently appeared again in a special episode commemorating the release of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs, opposite fellow Belvedere alumnus (though her political and social opposite) Derek Hatton.

In February 1994, she tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill to equalise the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual sex at 16. This amendment was defeated by 307 votes to 280, although a subsequent amendment resulted in the reduction of the homosexual age of consent from 21 to 18; equalisation was achieved some years later as a result of the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the Euan Sutherland case.

[edit] Author

Currie is the author of six novels: A Parliamentary Affair (1994), A Woman's Place (1996) She's Leaving Home (1997), The Ambassador (1999), Chasing Men (2000) and This Honourable House (2001). She has also written four works of non-fiction: Life Lines (1989), What Women Want (1990), Three Line Quips (1992) and Diaries 1987–92 (2002).

Her diaries caused a sensation, since they revealed she had had a four-year affair with John Major, who was later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, starting in 1984 and ending in 1988. During a live television interview on RTÉ's The Late Late Show in 2002, she famously slipped up when, discussing her recent marriage, she referred to her new husband as "John Major" (instead of her husband's actual name, John Jones), a mistake which made international headlines and which is regularly shown on TV stations worldwide as a notorious faux pas. She also starred in Hell's Kitchen on ITV and Wife Swap, opposite John McCririck on Channel 4 as part of a one off celebrity special.

[edit] Private life

In 1972, Edwina Cohen married accountant Ray Currie. They had two children. They divorced in 1997. In 1999, she married John Jones, a retired detective. Edwina and second husband John, took part in Wife Swap along with John McCririck and his wife, Jenny. Edwina strongly disapproved of McCririck's habits, some of which are: eating in bed and not at the dining table, refusing to drive the car and cook. Edwina became so enraged with his behaviour, that she threw a glass of wine over him.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikivisual.com/index.php/Edwina_Currie"
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