John Prescott with wife Pauline

London, April 30: The Mail on Sunday newspaper today sought to make maximum capital out of buying Tracey Temple’s account of her two-year affair with her boss, John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister.

The 43-year-old secretary, who conveniently kept a diary, claimed, among other things, that she had sex with Prescott in his Whitehall office (of the Monica Lewinsky variety, apparently).

She and Prescott had sex immediately after he had taken her to the Iraq war memorial service. They also had sex in a Southampton hotel while his wife, Pauline, waited downstairs.

She insisted the media had been unfair in questioning her morals. “I am not the siren type ? I have only had eight lovers in my life,” she pointed out.

Some of the encounters were in Prescott’s official apartments in Admiralty House, under which traffic passes from Trafalgar Square on its way to Buckingham Palace.

On some occasions, Prescott’s driver dropped her off afterwards, when she had a train to catch to get back to her home in Hampshire.

Her publicist, Max Clifford, has said Temple has sold her story for a figure well in excess of ?100,000. One report put it at ?250,000.

This brought a protest from Prescott.

“I have admitted that Tracey Temple and I had intimate relations. However, much of her recollections in The Mail on Sunday are simply untrue and are clearly motivated by a desire to maximise financial gain.”

No doubt, he will eventually be asked by the media to point out where he disagrees with her. She claims Prescott was given to groping her and to demanding sex, although the sex itself, if Temple is to be believed, was not always satisfying.

She never stayed the night with him, she adds.

“I don’t regret having the affair,” Temple tells the paper. “It wasn’t a serious relationship. There were moments when I thought to myself, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ but I didn’t feel it was wrong.”

Theirs is the sort of relationship that takes place in thousands of offices all over Britain. Quite apart from causing great distress to his wife, Pauline, to whom he has been married for 44 years, Prescott has made himself and the government vulnerable to ridicule ? and may eventually have to be dropped by Tony Blair as irreparably damaged goods.

Among Tories who have laid into Prescott is Lord (Michael) Heseltine, who argued: “It is legitimate to say that a private affair is private, but we are not talking about the affair, we are talking about the behaviour of the Deputy Prime Minister. You simply cannot have a senior member of a government bringing that government into ridicule and contempt by the way in which that person behaves. That is what has happened.”

Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former director of communications, played down public interest in the affair.

Referring to England football team’s preparations for the World Cup and the fracture in his foot suffered by star player Wayne Rooney, Campbell said: “People today I think are probably a lot more interested in Wayne Rooney’s foot than in any part of John Prescott’s body.”