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29-2-2000 Daily Record ROBIN AND MAO BOTH NEEDED SEX AND POWER Ex-wife piles on agony for Cook in new book GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN EXCLUSIVE ROBIN Cook's ex-wife has twisted the knife into her cheating husband by comparing him to sex-mad Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung. In a new book on power-crazed leaders, Margaret Cook says Mao had an insatiable appetite for sex and believed in the Chinese culture of having sex with young virgins to achieve longevity. And she said it was impossible to consider the former Chinese leader without thinking of Robin, 54, who had a string of affairs during their marriage and left her for his 41-year-old secretary Gaynor Regan. Margaret has already humiliated her ex in an autobiography which branded him an adulterous drunk. And he's not likely to get off lightly in the new book, provisionally entitled Power Crazy. In a BBC interview, she said she believed there was a clear link between sex and power. She said: "The one I am thinking of particularly is Mao Tse Tung. "His sexual activity seemed to get ever more exotic and demanding and voracious as he got older. "The Chinese have a culture that if you have sex with young virgins then you will achieve longevity. "But I think it is more than that. It seems to me that it is the very primitive association of power and access to lots of females, you know, this is what happens in the wild." And asked directly if her ex played a part in her research, she replied: "It would be silly of me to deny that knowing him so well I recognise quite a lot of what I am going to write about in his way of behaving and the way he evolved. He will recognise a few echoes." In her original book, Margaret described how she had watched her former husband change from a brilliant idealist to a man whose personality was ruined by ambition. She wrote: "I did not know the person he had become. He had coarsened and hardened and lost all the sensitive, soft, interactive and feeling parts of his nature." She described how he began to drink heavily and take sleeping pills, while at the same time his memory went, his wit and conversation vanished and his weight fell. And she added: "He seemed to teeter on the brink of total mental and physical collapse." But in her latest interview, she said she believed all leaders changed as they rose through the ranks. She said: "Men, and this is also very primitive behaviour, get a little entourage about them of people who think like them and as often as not people surrounding them have ambitions of their own. "They add to this mesmerising. You only see what is around you, you don't see the big picture. "For that reason I'm sure that people who become leaders should do so for a very short time and I think it is questionable whether they should be leaders in a big pool, and I think that's one argument for devolution. "The more I look at people who become leaders the more I realise that they are a very select population and they are probably the last people who should be in that position at all." And she said there was a streak of madness in all leaders. She said: "I think if you don't have it to start with, you certainly do acquire it very quickly."
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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