Two af fairs of Ukip leadership hopeful who said: I’ve got no skeletons!
EURO MP Diane James is favourite to become the new leader of Ukip after launching her campaign boasting: ‘There are no flaws, there are no skeletons in the cupboard and no bad news stories.’
Yet far from being free of skeletons, her cupboard seems positively bulging with them.
The Mail can reveal the 56-year-old politician has been involved in the break-up of two marriages. An affair with a married adviser to a defence secretary at the time even led to inquiries by Military Police.
She also has some explaining to do regarding her current partner, who was named in the leaked ‘Panama papers’ as having established a firm in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.
And even the academic qualifications claimed by Mrs James, a close associate of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, require some explaining.
Former grammar school girl Mrs James worked in private healthcare firms for several decades before becoming an independent local councillor in Waverley, Surrey, ten years ago.
She switched to Ukip and became the party’s MEP for the South East in 2014. She has since risen rapidly through the ranks to be appointed deputy leader earlier this year, shortly before mounting her campaign to became new leader after Mr Farage’s latest resignation.
But as she tours the country campaigning, she has not mentioned how in 1998 a tabloid newspaper exposed her affair with senior MoD official Ron Smith, a married man and aide to the then Labour defence secretary George Robertson.
For three years she had been the secret lover of Mr Smith, a former RAF wing commander six years her senior, who had become chief executive of the MoD’s Defence Secondary Care Agency. Their affair emerged when his wife Susan, herself an RAF wing commander with an MBE, was investigated by the Military Police over a financial matter.
Mrs James was interviewed by police, although there was no suggestion of any financial irregularity on her part.
She continued seeing Mr Smith, who had two children from a previous marriage, for at least three months after his wife found out and he promised to end the affair. Amid the furore, he resigned from his job. At the time, Mrs
‘I can’t speak about it’
James, after being pictured being kissed and hugged by her married lover told the Mirror: ‘I can’t speak about it. The Military Police have told me not to say anything. This will ruin me.’
By 2005, however, she had taken up with another married man – John Forrest, now 73, who is 17 years her senior. They live together in a secluded £1million house in Surrey. He had been married to his wife Jane for 32 years at the time. Mrs Forrest, 65, who now lives alone in the New Forest in Hampshire, declined to discuss Mrs James and her husband.
Dr Forrest, who was made a CBE in 2002, had directorships at Marconi Defence Systems and the 3i venture capital firm. But as well as operating a number of businesses with Mrs James – who has talked of working in ‘healthcare’ – the Panama papers show that in 2005 Dr Forrest had a company set up in the British Virgin Islands.
He is listed as a shareholder in BVI-registered Leparin Ltd, giving as his address the holiday home he shares with Mrs James in Provence in the south of France. The agent involved in establishing the company was the Panama law firm at the centre of the Panama papers leak in April, Mossack Fonseca.
Last night Dr Forrest and Mrs James declined to discuss Leparin.
Mrs James was also unwilling to clarify her academic record. A local newspaper interview suggested she had a degree from Thames Valley University in business and tourism, but an online critic queried whether it was a degree-awarding institution when she went there.
Mrs James’s spokesman declined to comment on her qualifications, her relationships with married men or the Military Police investigation.