Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s ex-husband reassured her that she was a good sexual partner before she began dating again.
The former Labour MP turned to dating apps after the breakdown of her marriage to love-cheat Richard Timney.
But she was initially petrified at the thought of sex with another man.
She said: “If you’ve slept with the same person for 33 years you are stricken with this idea of ‘supposing I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.’
“One of the nice things that my husband did was say to me: ‘You’re very good at sex, don’t worry about that.’
“Isn’t that a kind thing to do?”, she added to Kaye Adams on her How to be 60 podcast: “I thought to myself, how the hell he knew. Well, he did though. He’d been off with somebody else.”
Jacqui, the first female Home Secretary, said even the end of her political career in 2010 was not as devastating as losing her marriage.
It hit the rocks in 2009, when among other things, it emerged she had claimed expenses for two porn films watched by Richard, who was also her Parliamentary aide.
But Jacqui said she regretted trying for so long to keep the marriage working. She added to Kaye: “I worked to keep us together, which was possibly a mistake.”
Jacqui, 60, revealed that her decision to take part in Strictly Come Dancing in 2020 was fuelled by her marriage coming to an end in 2018.
She said of the show: “Notwithstanding being booted out at the first opportunity, I loved it.
“If anything is going to take your mind off your life, that is.”
