"THERE'S a wonderful line at the end of one of Travolta films Saturday Night Fever I think when he says, `I am an able person'. And I thought, yes. I am an able person. I can do other things.
John Travolta is not a usual source for politicians' quotes. (Few of them, indeed, could do the accent). But then Edwina Currie is not your usual sort of politician. Travolta's words of wisdom were called to mind in 1988 when, as undersecretary of state in the British department of health Mrs Currie committed the cardinal sin of telling the truth about the risk of salmonella in eggs. The high profile, high heeled member for South Derbyshire was duly sacked.
Edwina Currie had climbed the ladder of political preferment with the speed of the favoured; her descent via the snake of Thatcher's displeasure devastated her. But she was indeed an able person: Oxford scholar, MSc from London University, teacher ("nine years off and on"), mother (two girls) and local politician to boot, acknowledged even by her opponents as an intelligent, radical free thinker. One of the other things Currie could do was write. Unusually for a minister of the crown she wrote all her own speeches ("I drove my staff crazy.")
"It was the Christmas recess and I wrote three short stories as therapy. Just to make myself concentrate on something "else. Nothing to do with politics. One of the people who wrote to me after I left government was the agent Hillary Rubenstein. I handed these pieces over and they were sold for a thousand quid each." And she cackles - more like a teenager who's just hit the jackpot on a pub fruit machine than a Tory MP who hits 50 next week.
Life as a backbencher went on. She took on unpopular causes, people who she felt were short changed, all pretty un-Torylike, all to do with equality - homosexuality, racism and women. (Later this would include the debate she is most proud of, the cross party attempt to lower the age of consent for homosexuals to that of heterosexuals. It failed.)
But as the election of 1992 approached so did the very real prospect of losing her seat. "What about a novel?" said her agent. "It's staring you in the face. You're always entertaining us with stories of what the blokes get up to."
Two years later "what the blokes got up to" was everybody's entertainment. A Parliamentary Affair went straight to the top of the UK bestseller list. So far it has sold 500,000 copies worldwide. And no wonder. Quite apart from the prurient titillation of suspender belt sex in high and indeed - uncomfortable places, according to a senior civil servant of my acquaintance, it gives a "unnervingly accurate" - portrayal of life in the hothouse that is the House of Commons.
But can the high jinks she describes really have their basis in reality? "This is a very bizarre, gothic place," she explains, "and attracted to it are some very strange personalities, and some enormous egos - people who are incapable of considering the needs and the wants and the pains of others. And that in itself makes them quite extraordinary. They are often very attractive figures. These are people who look at themselves in the mirror in the morning and like what they see."
The vast majority of the 651 men and women MPs, she admits, are "honourable, decent and dull and not easy fodder for writing. So you pick the ones that are not honourable, not decent, and not dull and you have a lot of fun with them.
She did not have fun with them in 1983, when as one of only 13 female Tory MPs she arrived in Westminster. Although by no means a rigid feminist, she was appalled. "I had got very angry at the way chaps here talked about women. And they would do it in front me because I wasn't `a woman', I was a fellow member. And I would get hot under the collar, disgusted and embarrassed. And I got upset because I'm a Tory member of parliament and I thought that Tories should behave better than some of them were behaving. And remember it was not known then."
It being sexual shenanigans.
Although A Parliamentary Affair was not published until 1994, she started it in 1992 before the antics of David Mellor in his Chelsea strip hit the tabloids, and well before John Major's Back to Basics campaign (autumn 1993) and the string of resignations that followed. Currie believes that her fictional account might even have precipitated media exposure. "I wasn't the only person aware of what was going on and I wasn't, the only person cross about it. From the moment I handed over the script people were getting interested and very excited." Journalists simply put two and two together, she believes. "They flicked back through their notebooks and took a chance and printed it and there's no doubt, in one or two cases set the guys, up."
The incursion of the media into politicians' private lives - is one of the themes that form the backdrop to Edwina Currie's second novel, A Woman's Place, out in paperback this week. It brings together all her old passions and compassions - the plight of homosexuals racism, the running down of the health service plus a new fear - stalking and of course sleaze - in short the underside of Conservatism through which her alter ego Elaine Stalker MP (Currie in all but hair colour) picks her unsteady, if brave, way.
"For anyone in parliament who does it, and there have always have been quite a few writing novels is simply another way of getting the message across. On the other hand, if all you do is write a polemic you'll bore your readers. You might as well write about what you know. And you might as well put in emotions that you really feel" But from Disraeli, to Douglas Hurd no one has ever blown the whistle quite so loudly.
"I've always looked for the most pointed and effective way - to say something. I hate obfuscation and that is probably why I get a reputation as being outspoken. In fact I say much the same things as other people do but tend to say them in a very clear way. I know how to focus, how to concentrate on the topic to the point where you're driving it home. But you mustn't brow beat the reader who bought the book to be entertained."
After this week's front page allegations of bribery and corruption in relation to the extrade minister, Neil Hamilton, I wonder if she feels vindicated? The MP reflects and allows herself a half smile. "I think most of the passing of brown envelopes under the table has gone. And I'm glad of that." But nonetheless, she says, it highlights a problem that is inherent in MPs' low pay. "It may be why one or two colleagues are leaving parliament. They need the money. You could make a hell of a lot of money doing what one or two characters I won't name have been up to. And of course they weren't paying tax on it either."
The only long term answer, she believes, is root and branch parliamentary - reform money, hours and terms - crucial, she says, if the British parliament is to attract MPs of quality who are not only more normal" but are truly representative of the British people, which in her estimation should include "about 30 blacks and Asians and about 300 women".
Edwina Currie has never been one to shun the limelight. Indeed she clearly thrives on it, turning her head towards it like a sunflower. Perhaps it is simply part of the necessary armour to survive. As to the charge that the new rush of celebrity novelists are in effect cheating - put to her at a public forum last year - her defence is fierce. "How do you think we get to be celebrities?" she rounded on the heckler.
I'll tell you how. We work bloody hard. When you're watching TV we're still working. If we have a deadline to meet for nine o'clock, we'll work through the night. And work through the next day. We sell ourselves, we push hard. We ask for advice, we take advice. We work very hard at what we do and work very hard to improve ourselves. We are not celebrities by accident.