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:

    We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.
    Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)

    I cannot live with You—
    It would be Life
    And Life is over there—
    Behind the Shelf
    Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)