Former British Prime Minister John Major’s admission of adultery could prompt legal action from a magazine that says it was driven out of business after he sued it nearly a decade ago for suggesting he had had an affair.David Price, lawyer for the now defunct satire magazine Scallywag, said the journal never recovered after Major sued it in the early 1990s for repeating rumours that he had been involved with a woman who ran a catering service.Major acknowledged on Saturday that he had had an affair before becoming Prime Minister. Edwina Currie, an author and former minor cabinet official with whom he had had the liaison, revealed it in diaries serialised in a newspaper. Price said the revelation proved that the defamation suit against Scallywag was ‘‘an abuse of the libel laws’’. British Sunday newspapers were filled with interviews with Clare Latimer, the caterer falsely linked to Major in the Scallywag case, who said she now believed she was used to distract attention from the real skeletons in Major’s closet. She told the Telegraph: ‘‘He knew rumours were going around about him having an affair and was only too happy when a couple of publications got the name wrong, because he knew he could then sue and kill the story dead.’’Price said his team was going through the archives to see whether Major had actually denied that he was an adulterer in documents connected with the case. Major never appeared in court in the Scallywag case. The magazine settled by agreeing not to repeat the rumours linking Major and Latimer, with no cash settlement. But British libel law also allowed Major to sue the magazine’s printers and distributors, scaring them into dropping it. (Reuters)
