In her 2010 memoir, Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, Pauline Prescott gives a vivid account of the evening her husband raced home to tell her about his two-year affair. “It’ll be all over the newspapers tomorrow,” he tells her. “‘Who?’ I asked. I felt sick to my stomach. ‘Tracey,’ he replied, his voice breaking. ‘Tracey, in my office.’”
If political sex scandals were losing – even before Boris Johnson eradicated it – their essential career-ending potential, becoming lethal chiefly in relation to the miscreant’s hypocrisy and corruption, the domestic fallout appears, when compared with earlier survivors’ accounts, still to unfold along historic lines.
The minister is photographed, warned by a newspaper, and left with a few golden hours in which, before the shagging story comes out, to tell the person formerly known as his treasured helpmeet that things were not exactly as they seemed. Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of Chris Huhne and mother of their three children, described the efficiency with which, at half-time in the football match she was watching, the then energy minister informed her that her services in his election leaflets (“family matters so much to me”) were no longer required. Pausing to compose his statement – “I am in a serious relationship with Carina Trimingham and I am separating from my wife” – he headed for the gym.
Margaret Cook, hurriedly dumped in a Heathrow departure lounge, asked Robin Cook: “‘What would you do if I went into a deep depression and committed suicide?’ He paused, cool and aloof, as if posed a question on a public platform. ‘I should, of course, be sorry…’ ”. For recalling this later in a memoir, along with other disobliging details, she was cast as culpably unforgiving.
But even Cook, she said, arranged some protection. On the street, Martha Hancock did not look like someone much protected on the morning of her forced transformation into a public figure, specifically into an official victim: the object of fascinated pity and unrestrained public speculation – even by people who don’t, as a rule, think they go in for that kind of thing. Hancock-averse contributors to Mumsnet could be found, last week, trying to source his wife’s outfits, admiring the excellent sunglasses, her hair and the dress sense his shitty behaviour had also, by way of a bonus, offered for thorough analysis. Didn’t she, some thought, look just too good, considering? “She knows exactly what she’s doing.”
Back in 2006, John Prescott, too, appears to have redeemed himself a little by attempting – though she was unpersuadable – to spare Pauline her conscription as national tragic turn. “ ‘You need to pack some things,’ he told me. ‘We’ll go to Dorneywood. The media will be on their way. All hell’s going to break loose.’ ”
Just as it did when Mrs Hancock, her husband having become the latest idiot to flunk the political marshmallow test, became the available public face of his scandal. First the photographs, next the kind of glutinous commentary – “Dear Martha”, “a jilted wife writes”, “seeking professional help is advisable” – that passes off intrusion as emotional intelligence. Hancock, though nowhere to be seen, was already rumoured to be intent, with his “serious” replacement relationship, on a quick relaunch, while Mrs Hancock was still, with cameras scrupulously chronicling their own effect, acting proxy target.
And Oliver Tress, Gina Coladangelo’s husband, fellow collateral damage? Was he, too, still wearing his wedding ring? Devastated/bravely styling it out/suspiciously poised – and clearly longing for advice? Therapists were surely eager to remind him, as they have Mrs Hancock, not to burden the children, blame himself, drown his sorrows, and, in the nicest possible way, start “a new relationship any time soon”. But – it’s unclear whether he was considered less captivatingly broken or simply more difficult legally or physically to harass – Tress has been scarcely photographed and considered similarly ineligible for remote media counselling. These expressions of interest have been all Mrs Hancock’s.
Johnson may then have severed the once fruitful connection between personal betrayal (even at his own, pathological level) and political ignominy, but last week’s pursuit suggests that the collective stalking of associated women – that is, women lacking the alternative narrative opportunities of, say, a Sarah Vine – supplies at least some measure of very traditional, compensatory sport. Supposing the husband runs away, the wife, regardless of any formal public interest, can still legitimately be monitored over the coming days for signs of humiliation, real or imagined, then later, maybe indefinitely, for evidence of grudge-bearing, useless attempts – long after the man ceased being questioned on his affair/s – at self-liberation. Just recently, publicising her book, Marina Wheeler was still having to insist that Boris Johnson was not her defining feature.
Nor has the arrival, post Leveson, of the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s code of conduct (see, re Hancock, clauses 2, 3 and 6) been enough reliably to protect family non-contributors to a politician’s disgrace from the sort of mobbing that is now piously deprecated in the case of Diana, Princess of Wales; that, if it were to be inflicted on, say, a respected official by, say, a group of drunk estate agents, would instantly be denounced. Chris Whitty’s street molestation, after earlier aggression near his house, prompted justifiable outrage: “Despicable harassment… intimidation on our streets” (Boris Johnson); “appalling and totally unacceptable” (Sajid Javid). “These thugs must be found and charged,” said Nadim Zahawi. “Zero tolerance for harassing a public servant.” Bright side: nobody describes the monstered Mr Whitty as “humiliated”.
As for the “thugs”, they were reportedly upset that their high spirits had been unwelcome. “If I made [Prof Whitty] feel uncomfortable, which it does look like I did, then I am sorry to him for that,” one said. Not much, but way more gracious than anything Martha Hancock is likely to hear about treatment that her husband – had he ever attempted self-regulation – could easily have predicted from his party’s media allies.
- Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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