Stranger than fiction

If Jeffrey Archer had written about a junior minister's affair with a whip whom the junior minister called B because he was the second man in her life, we would have sneered that it was hardly true to life. It is not so much the idea of ministerial infidelity that is surprising but that Mrs Currie told a third minister – and it still remained a secret until now.

Step forward the one person to emerge from this vignette of contemporary history with an enhanced reputation: Antony Harold, Lord Newton of Braintree. As plain Tony Newton, he was Ms Currie's boss as a health minister before joining the Cabinet for almost forgotten stints in Trade and Industry and Social Security and as Leader of the House of Commons.

He restores meaning to those words once associated with the Major years but so quickly devalued by sleaze and incompetence: "decent" and "self-effacing".