Edwina Currie was successful in her libel claim against the newspaper The Observer, but future events complicated matters. It was reported in The Guardian (24th November 2002) that she was asked to give the resulting money to charity, with the paper stating:
"Edwina Currie, the former Cabinet Minister who had an affair with John Major, was yesterday asked to donate to charity the estimated £150,000 she was awarded in a legal action against The Observer in 1991.
Currie was granted damages of £5,000 over an interview with the actress Charlotte Rampling, who was playing an ambitious Tory MEP in the film Paris by Night. In the article, Rampling likened her character to 'an Edwina Currie figure' who drove her husband to drink, neglected her children, had a youngish lover and would kill to get ahead.
After a two-day trial in May 1991, Currie was successful in her defamation claim against The Observer and Donald Trelford, the paper's then editor. The paper also had to pick up a legal bill of around £150,000, which included Currie's legal costs, after she gave evidence that her marriage was strong and deplored any intrusions into the private life of her family.
Asked by George Carman, QC, acting for The Observer, whether she had 'never had a young lover', Currie replied that this was 'correct'.
Observer editor Roger Alton yesterday wrote to Currie asking her to examine her 'conscience and question whether it is right that you retain the damages and costs that you were awarded'. The decision to ask her to donate the £150,000 to charity follows disclosures by Currie about an affair she had with Major which finished in 1988, a year before she sued The Observer.
In her memoirs, covering 1987 to 1992, Currie wrote of the affair: 'I needed a friend. Then B [Major] came along, and he was so bloody nice and so attractive, and so quiet in public that it was a challenge to unearth the real person, and to seduce him - easy!'
She wrote of her then husband Ray: 'So why did I start? Because I was unhappy with a husband forever slumped snoring in front of the television, not helpful or interested in what I was trying to do.'
In his letter, Alton states: 'You brought the action on the basis that you had a happy family unit, which clearly does not equate to a four-year affair, which you have now publicised worldwide and from which, I presume, you have made a lot of money. Given what we know today, it is inconceivable that you would have brought the action and utterly unbelievable that the jury would have found in your favour had it got as far as a trial.'
The letter continues: 'The Observer is donating to the following charities for our Christmas appeal: Wateraid (a charity dedicated exclusively to the sustainable provision of safe domestic water, sanitation and hygiene education to the world's poorest people) and Fairbridge, (which gives young people from the most disadvantaged urban areas in the UK a fairer chance to succeed in life).
'I think it is only appropriate that you donate your damages and costs to one of these charities.'"