Mrs Currie's tell-all memoirs will do no lasting harm to Mr Major's reputation

Edwina Currie's revelations could have one beneficial effect: they might persuade the public to form a more rounded impression of John Major. No recent Prime Minister has been more misunderstood and misrepresented. By 1997, millions of voters were firmly convinced that their PM was a colourless weakling, a view which could not have survived 20 seconds in Mr Major's company. Thanks to Mrs Currie's mercenary betrayal, the public will now have the chance to see John Major in a rather more intimate setting than he would have preferred. But it might help to set the record straight.

In another respect, however, the whole business is depressing. This is nothing to do with Edwina Currie's behaviour, for no one who has met her would have expected anything else. There are no standards below which she would not sink. But the brouhaha which she has created does suggest that much of the British public is still unhealthily obsessed with other people's private lives.

During the First World War, Lloyd George once asked Clemenceau if a certain French minister could undertake a diplomatic mission. "Alas, no: I cannot ask the poor fellow to do anything at the moment. He is tout à fait bouleversé." "Why? What has happened?"

"He has suffered the worst misfortune which can befall any Frenchman. His mistress's husband has just died."

One does not have to wish to imitate the French in everything – and especially not in the cynicism and corruption which pervade their public life – to believe that they do order certain matters better on the wrong side of the Channel. They certainly have an altogether a more grown-up attitude to sexual behaviour.

What does it matter whether a politician commits adultery? It is not a criminal offence. There could, of course, be a risk of blackmail, but if our public opinion were somewhat more sophisticated, that would disappear. Nor should the tabloids be entitled to trash an adulterous MP merely because he has used family photographs in his election literature. Mankind is not a naturally monogamous species. Many millions of marriages have survived a brush with infidelity; many of them have survived only because of a brush with infidelity. A husband can be unfaithful and still be devoted to his wife and children.

If this appears to condone hypocrisy, so be it. Hypocrisy has been defined as the tribute which vice pays to virtue. Given that it can never be eliminated, vice ought to pay tribute to virtue. In moderate doses, hypocrisy is an important social cement.

Back in the Heath era, Lords Jellicoe and Lambton had to resign from the government because of sexual indiscretion. Bernard Levin, who found the whole matter absurd, predicted that this would be the last occasion on which ministers would have to fall on their swords over a sexual peccadillo. He ought to have been right, yet he could not have been more wrong. That is not a compliment to the British people's political or cultural maturity.

When much of television is taken up with soap operas and some newspapers actually turn the doings of fictional characters into news stories, while many other papers are full of the private lives of the marginally famous, one is drawn to melancholic conclusions about the condition of Britain. Can it really be true that vast numbers of our fellow countrymen lead lives of such inadequacy and tedium that they become fixated by such trivia? That is what those who make a good living by calculating the popular taste have concluded, and there is no evidence that they are mistaken.

If the details of Mr Major's liaison with Mrs Currie had been revealed back in the late 1980s, he would almost certainly not have become Prime Minister. Michael Heseltine might well have won the Tory leadership and, if so, split his party. An earlier revelation by Mrs Currie could have brought Neil Kinnock to Downing Street. If she had waited until Mr Major had become PM, he might have survived, but his premiership would have been even unhappier than it already was.

Yet this is ridiculous. It is possible to take more than one view of the Major premiership. I have always argued that he will be much more favourably treated by posterity than by his contemporaries, in that he made a brave attempt to tackle deep-seated problems – many inherited from Margaret Thatcher – and by no means without success. I could not claim that there is a consensus behind this view, but even those who are still inclined to blame John Major for everything from wet weather to the loss of the Ashes would surely not argue that his dalliance with Edwina Currie should weigh heavily in the scales.

In the mid-1980s, John Major was a fit, attractive young man who spent most of his weeks on his own in London. I once heard a Tory MP's wife say that, in her view, any wife who did not ensure that she spent four or five nights a week in the same bed as her husband was asking for trouble. But these matters are not always easy to organise, especially when it is preferable to bring up children in houses with gardens in rural constituencies rather than in cramped flats around Westminster.

Edwina Currie has feline charms, as well as a feline's morals. Equally, politics is a high-intensity profession, and one form of energy creates others. Politicians who enjoy discussing their trade with fellow politicians of the opposite sex can easily be tempted to introduce a horizontal element into the conversion.

But all this is irrelevant to the great issues of the day. It was, however, unfortunate that John Major gave cover to those in pursuit of sexual misadventures by launching his "back to basics" campaign. He never intended this to have anything to do with private moral questions. At a philosophical level, he was always interested in finding a way to combine the economic dynamism of the 1990s with the social stability of the 1950s (and there was plenty of adultery in the 50s). On a practical level, he believed that many schools had lost sight of old-fashioned, common-sense teaching methods, and of the need to maintain discipline in the classroom.

That was what he meant by "back to basics". But others had other ideas. Every Conservative spokesman who commented on the matter appeared to have his own agenda, so the whole topic spun out of control. That was typical of the lucklessness which bedevilled Mr Major's period as Prime Minister. Thanks to Edwina Currie, he is yet again out of luck. John Major and his family will have hated the past few days. But these things pass.

John Major is young enough and healthy enough to have every prospect of contributing to British political debate for at least the next two decades. Long before the end of that time, I believe that his premiership will be seen in a more favourable light. And long before the end of that time, Edwina Currie will have been forgotten, and left to wallow in bile and bitterness.

The writer's biography of John Major was published in 1991