Australians were aghast when former Labour Prime Minister Paul Keatingand his wife Annita split in 1998. Now she has broken six years of silence about their personal life.
She has revealed that her husband ended their 23-year marriage, informing her in front of friends at a dinner party that it
was over.
"It was like being stabbed," she told the Bulletin. "It wasn't my doing ... When he said it to me, I said it would be the biggest mistake he ever made in his life."
She said she was "devastated" when Keating made a speech at a Labor Party conference in 1999 in which he said he would always love her - words interpreted as a plea for her return. "That hurt," she said.
Keating dismissed the interview as "only one version of events", saying: "No onlooker can ever know what goes on inside a marriage."
