Prescott's wife recalls day he admitted to cheating

London: John Prescott's wife on Sunday revealed that she still cannot forgive him for his notorious affair with his secretary.

Pauline Prescott told how she had been unable even to speak to him for weeks after he broke the news that he had been cheating on her with Tracey Temple.

Their sons were eventually able to arrange a meeting between the pair. But, nearly four years on, she said the disappointment of his betrayal would never leave her.

"People have asked if I have forgiven him and the answer is that I haven't, because to forgive is to condone," she wrote.

"I have accepted that the affair happened but I've made the decision not to throw all of our lives in turmoil over what he did."

Pauline, 70, gave her insight into the bombshell news of his infidelity after 45 years of marriage in her autobiography, Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, which is being serialised in the Mail on Sunday.

And she said her husband had planned to resign as Deputy Prime Minister following a string of embarrassing revelations about the affair, only for her to talk him out of quitting, saying: "You've worked too hard for this."

The couple have been married since 1961, when Prescott was a 23-year-old ship's steward and his new wife a 22-year-old hairdresser.

She tells how, following his election to Parliament in 1970, she was content to be a traditional political wife.

So when he arrived home unexpectedly early on April 27, 2006, to reveal the bombshell news before she read it in the next day's newspapers, the shock was total.

Pauline recalled how he ordered her to sit down, "his face like granite". She half-jokingly asked: "You don't want a divorce, do you?" to which he replied: "No, but you might once you've heard what I've got to say." And he broke the news to her, "I've had an affair."

Pauline wrote: " ‘Who?' I asked. I felt sick to my stomach. ‘Tracey', he replied, his voice breaking. ‘Tracey, in my office'." She asked how long it had been going on for, and he shocked her by answering: "Two years."

He instructed her to pack her things ready to travel down to Dorneywood, his official residence, to escape the media.

Instead she told him: "If you think I'm fleeing my home in the middle of the night, you don't know me very well, John Prescott. You go. I'm staying. I've done nothing wrong."

She wrote that the affair had made her stronger while making her husband "a little bit softer" with her.