Martha Hancock, like many politicians’ wives before her, has been left to deal with the scrum
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.
