James Gray (British Politician) - Personal Life

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:

    Keep your own secret, and get out other people’s. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people’s. Counterwork your rivals with diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)