Personal Life
Gray married Sarah Ann Beale in 1980, and they have two sons and a daughter. The marriage ended in 2006, after it emerged that Gray was having an affair with a married woman, Phillipa Mayo, while his wife was fighting breast cancer. This was brought to public attention by BBC TV's Have I Got News for You programme, broadcast on 22 May 2009, when the studio audience showed their opinion by booing Gray. He had met Mrs Mayo, then Director of the Countryside Alliance's pro-hunting campaign, while organising Conservative opposition to the anti-hunting bill. The affair attracted national press attention when Mrs Mayo's husband, the barrister Rupert Mayo, wrote to a local newspaper, the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald, "The irony is that I will not reap the benefits of Mr Cameron's excellent family-based policy proposals because one of his own MPs has ripped my own family apart." The local Conservative association subsequently considered deselecting Gray as their parliamentary candidate, but in January 2007, after a secret ballot of all local party members, decided to confirm him as the Conservative candidate for North Wiltshire.
Read more about this topic: James Gray (British Politician)
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The personal touch between the people and the man to whom they temporarily delegated power of course conduces to a better understanding between them. Moreover, I ought not to omit to mention as a useful result of my journeying that I am to visit a great many expositions and fairs, and that the curiosity to see the President will certainly increase the box receipts and tend to rescue many commendable enterprises from financial disaster.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Whoever takes a view of the life of man ... will find it so beset and hemm’d in with obligations of one kind or other, as to leave little room to suspect, that man can live to himself: and so closely has our creator link’d us together ... that we find this bond of mutual dependence ... is too strong to be broke.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)