Edwina Currie, 77, is an author and one of Westminster’s most colorful students, writes Angela Epstein. Currie, MP for South Derbyshire from 1983 to 1997, was a minister under Margaret Thatcher.
But her career came to an abrupt end in 1988 when, as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, she issued a warning about salmonella in British eggs and resigned. Married twice (her second husband, John Jones, died of cancer in 2020), Edwina has two children and two grandchildren and lives in Derbyshire.
What did your parents teach you about money?
To be careful with that. There wasn’t much in a devastated Liverpool after the Second World War. My father was a tailor and my mother was a housewife. Sadly, Dad died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 65, leaving £400. We children encouraged Mum to go to work, especially to help with the grieving process. She worked until she was 75 years old doing paperwork for a law firm.
Edwina Currie reads a mock Daily Mail to promote her best-selling book, A Parliamentary Affair, in 1994.
Have you ever struggled to make ends meet?
It wasn’t easy in the early years of my first marriage. Ray (her first husband) was a chartered accountant; We lived in Birmingham with two small children and had a mortgage that was suffocating us. We had bought a three-bedroom house on the Bournville estate with a large garden, fruit trees and roses.
I set myself the ambitious goal of earning £1,000 a year hosting students from the University of Birmingham. The deal was that they could have a room at a reduced rate if they would look after us one night a week.
I also tutored for the Open University.
What is the most expensive thing you bought for fun?
I was in Dublin on tour in 1994 for my best-selling book, A Parliamentary Affair, when I stumbled upon a small jewelry store with a 1930s Rolex in the window. It was like a pat on the back for all that hard work. It was also fun to buy a Tesla: it costs almost nothing to run, but repairs are expensive.
What is the biggest money mistake you have made?
Buy venture capital trusts (APVs): they are good to buy and almost impossible to sell. When they fall and have no value they don’t pay you anything. I lost about £20,000 about 20 years ago, which was a huge blow.
Edwina appeared on I’m a Celebrity, where she says she was paid a five-figure sum “in exchange for three weeks of nice weather in a beautiful country, sitting in the shade of a treetop with some pretty nice people.”
Best money decision you’ve ever made?
Once I stopped being a minister and started writing books and they were successful, I decided to create a pension fund. I started when I was 50 and paid until I was 75, after which my accountant told me, “stop and start withdrawing money.”
I have a Ukrainian family who has been staying with me for more than two years and I recently took them to Barcelona with them. I also took them to Croatia as a birthday present for one of the boys. He loves the band Imagine Dragons and we all went to this amazing outdoor concert.
How many properties do you have?
I have two. There’s my house, which is a 400-year-old three-bedroom cottage in Derbyshire. And, as a result of my writing, I am a shareholder in a company that owns a house in the neighboring town that is rented. Once it is empty, I hope my Ukrainian guests will settle there.
The family fled Donbass to Odessa in 2014, and when the second invasion happened two years ago, they fled to Moldova and I learned about them through a friend. John had just passed away after a long battle with cancer and I thought, well, I’ve got the room. If they can put up with me, I can put up with them. And it has been beautiful. What’s more, my grandmother was born in Ukraine.
It used to be a bigger “landlord”; At one point I bought a flat in Liverpool for my mother and told her the rent was £1 a year and a good chicken dinner. At least that meant he could keep an eye on her!
Have you ever been paid silly money?
I was paid a five-figure sum to take part in I’m A Celebrity, in exchange for three weeks of nice weather in a beautiful country, sitting in the shade of a tree with some pretty nice people.
When I came back from Australia, money was burning a hole in my pocket, so we spent it converting our garage into an extension. Before we did this, when we had parties at our little cabin, people were standing on top of each other! I call the extension the jungle room. It has a mural with exotic animals such as birds of paradise, bush babies and 23 types of bugs.
If you were chancellor, what would you do?
Run away, I think. No, seriously, trying to balance the competing demands for more money needed for, say, the health service, improving roads and developing nuclear energy with tax cuts is a very complicated thing.
I would recognize that we need international investment and that means we should welcome foreigners and not penalize the non-dominant, which I think is a big kick in the foot.
Do you donate money to charities?
Blythe House Hospice Care (blythehousehospice.org.uk) in Derbyshire is a very important charity. When John was suffering from cancer, he didn’t go to hospice – the charity offers palliative care at home. This was invaluable as he was ill during lockdown. If John had gone to the hospital, we wouldn’t have been able to visit him. I appealed to Blythe House, where he got carers, a hospital bed at home and a visit from a palliative care doctor. John died in November 2020 at age 79.
What is your number one financial priority?
It’s the same as my parents’: paying the bills. I’m still that young girl in devastated Liverpool listening to my mother worry about paying the bills. If I can’t afford to do something, I don’t do it. It is the safest way to live.
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