My marriage ‘warmed’ after my stroke, says Marr (who got gagging order over an affair)
ANDREW Marr says that his relationship with his wife has become ‘warmer’ following his stroke.
The BBC broadcaster’s marriage to journalist Jackie Ashley has been rocked by scandals, including a longrunning affair which he sought to conceal via a court gagging order.
In a separate incident, the Scot was photographed kissing a colleague outside a bar in 2012. But following his stroke a year later, Glasgow-born Marr, 57, said his relationship with Miss Ashley is ‘better and warmer’ than ever.
‘I was very lucky with Jackie because she had grown up from when she was young with a father who was deaf,’ Marr told the Radio Times, referring to Miss Ashley’s father, the Labour MP Jack Ashley. ‘You might think she has had the worst luck of all, having looked after her father, and then this happens to me.
‘But she has been very good about shepherding me through the process.’
Marr, then 53, nearly died following his stroke in 2013 and was admitted to Charing Cross Hospital in the middle of the night. He said: ‘I tore the carotid
‘She has been very good with me’
artery and that blocked the blood supply to the bit of the brain that happens to control motor function on the left side of the body.’
Miss Ashley, 62, took nine months’ leave to care for him after the stoke left him partly paralysed. She tells a BBC2 documentary that once she learnt her husband would survive, it ‘wouldn’t matter’ that he was disabled. The documentary, My Brain And Me, to be shown on February 14, follows Marr while he has various experimental stroke treatments, including one using the controversial drug etanercept.
Miss Ashley’s show of devotion came despite Marr’s confession that he had taken out a High Court injunction to hush up an extramarital affair.
The relationship, which ended in 2003, was common knowledge at Westminster and within the BBC, where he was political editor. At the time, he believed he had fathered a child with the woman but a DNA test confirmed he was not the father. He eventually came clean about the affair in a 2011 interview in the Daily Mail where he said he was Joe Stenson HE was told he had only two days to live after suffering a blood clot and contracting a flesh-eating bug.
But a Catholic priest has left doctors stunned by surviving and claiming he was saved by the ‘miracle’ intervention of a Scots nun who died in 1925.
Monsignor Peter Smith, 58, was diagnosed with the deadly conditions in Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital after surgery in November for prostate cancer.
The parish priest of St Paul’s in Whiteinch, Glasgow, was given the last rites and his family arrived to say goodbye after doctors told him the grim outlook.
But three months later he has defied the odds with his recovery.
Mgr Smith believes this is a result of intercession by Margaret Sinclair, an Edinburgh nun whose acts of kindness saw her officially venerated by the church in 1978. If the ‘miracle’ is officially approved by the Pope it could elevate her to sainthood.
He recalled how he awoke in agony following what had seemed successful surgery to remove a lump.
‘I felt as if someone had shoved one of those big fat old-fashioned ‘embarrassed’ about the injunction, adding: ‘I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists.’
Miss Ashley, with whom Marr has three children, stuck by him. She was said to be ‘very cross’ when he was photographed kissing a colleague a year later.
Marr met Miss Ashley – the daughter of Lord Ashley of Stoke, the first deaf MP and a Labour peer until his death in 2012 – in 1986 when he worked for the Independent and she was with ITN. Until recently they lived in East Sheen, South West London, but have moved to Primrose Hill, North London, to allow Marr to walk to work.