Tony Blair explains why politicians have affairs

[compak]

In a remarkably frank memoir, former Prime Minister Tony Blair explains the reasons why politicians in high positions often cross the line and have affairs with women: for the thrill of an "explosion of irresponsibility".

Blair explores the "free-bird" impulse to have affairs "to spring you from that prison of self-control," and says: "Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control."

"Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue and issues and endless machinations and the serious piled on the serious, and just put on a remote desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree.

You become a different person, if only for an instant, until returned back to reality."

According to him, many women found politicians highly desirable. He writes in his best-selling memoir: "It's a strange thing, politics and ***. People have often said to me that power is a kind of aphrodisiac, and so women - politics still being male-dominated - would come on to politicians in a way they would never dream of with anyone else."

Blair seeks to justify the behaviour of his former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who had an affair with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary, by saying: "I totally understood the desire to escape. And it's nothing really to do with how happy or otherwise your marriage is. It's an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life."

As parts of the book surprises many inside and outside Westminster, Blair writes: "The issue is not the fornication, but the complication."

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