Hell hath no fury like a woman left out of an index

There was always something Dickensian about Edwina Currie. The master would have been proud to come up with a name of such aspiration and bathos. Her rapid ability to shift between Ethel Merman-like harangues and toe-curling flirtatiousness was worthy of a bit-part in Nicholas Nickleby.

If her novels offer no competition to Dickens – I have read more than one of them, and all that I can recall of them is the single word "moist" – Mrs Currie herself might have been one of his best inventions. The revelation of her affair with John Major is the most sensationally bizarre plot twist yet. It's as if Flora Finching got off with Bob Cratchit.

Dickens, of course, always fixes his more grotesque characters with a single ludicrous detail. In Mrs Currie's case, the brilliant detail came at the weekend. The diaries offer a wealth of hilariously self-deluding vignettes, such as her brilliant idea that she might run for the party leadership, on the basis that 78 per cent of the population knew who she was. (In 1988, 78 per cent of the population could probably recognise Mr Blobby, too, but that didn't necessarily mean that they wanted him as Prime Minister). The perfect, devastating line, however, was this. When John Major published his memoirs after leaving office, Mrs Currie was shocked and distressed to find, she says, that she wasn't mentioned in the index.

That is exactly what she said, but it seems a very strange way of putting it. Surely, the natural thing to say is that "the book didn't mention me at all". By confining her observation to the index, Mrs Currie does make it seem that that is the only thing she looked at. You wonder whether she did any more than go to look at it in the bookshop. This seems odd; I must say that if I had an affair lasting four years with someone, I would want to read his memoirs whether they mentioned me or not. It is all too easy to reconstruct the scene, as, perhaps, Mrs Currie herself might have described it:

"As Edwina entered the exclusive Piccadilly branch of Books Etc, she was aware that she was drawing admiring glances. That was customary, considering that she was famous throughout Great Britain, the country of which London was the capital, as a rising parliamentary star, talked of as the next Prime Minister and had a reputation for hard-talking common sense on the subject of Eggs. And, at 45, in her Manolo Blahnik little black dress and exclusive Prochaine stilettos, she still possessed a powerful sexual allure that made strong men wince at 40 yards.

"Today, she ignored the many admiring looks and quickly found for what she was looking. There it was. John's book. It reminded her so of John himself. Proud, erect, stiff, and blue. She wrapped her perfectly manicured hands around the spine, and turned with efficient quickness to the index. Surely the man to whom she had devoted years of her hard-hitting blunt-speaking career as the prestigious junior minister for Eggs would pay her the tribute she so richly deserved?

"An icy shudder ran down her spine! 'Cromwell, Oliver; Cruelty to badgers, bill to promote; Custard, author's fondness for cold...' she read. Her name was nowhere to be seen! She felt betrayed, abandoned, almost tearful. This will never do, Edwina, she told herself. With a single fierce gesture, she thrust the book back and marched proudly out of the shop. 'Men!' she thought. Well, she would show them. Just as she always had..."

The juggernaut of Mrs Currie's self-esteem has always been apparent. But it has always been a rather nebulous impression until now, and Dickens would not really have been satisfied with what he had created. It really needed one final glorious detail, and with this we can all say rem acu tetigisti – you have put your finger on it. From now on, it will be difficult to think of Mrs Currie without summoning up the mental image of her picking up volume after volume in bookshops and looking at the indexes for her own name; searching with increasing desperation to see what impact she has made on the lives of the political masters of the day and on the Oxford Companion to English Literature, what mark she has left on history with her plain-speaking and her common sense.

It is terribly reminiscent of Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames, who made a pact with the devil and was transported a hundred years into the future in order to try and find some reference to himself in the British Library of the late 1990s. Everyone knows what he found there; nothing. Eavesdroppers, as nanny told you, never hear any good of themselves; one might add that those who habitually look up their own names in other people's indexes are the people least likely, in the end, to find themselves there.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk