She may have her own public image problems, but nothing prepared Belinda Neal for her husband John Della Bosca’s confession of infidelity, writes Tracey Curro.
It’s not easy to reconcile the gentle image of the well-groomed blonde woman posed wistfully by the window of a Canberra hotel room with Belinda Neal’s reputation as the volatile federal MP and wife of recently resigned NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca.
As she responds to the “click, click” of the photographer’s shutter, there is no hint of the sharp edges or the outbursts that have shaped the public perception of 46-year-old Belinda, most infamously last year at Iguana Joe’s nightclub at Gosford, in her NSW Central Coast electorate. Yet Belinda Neal has had the kind of start to the month that would make anyone a little reticent.
It’s just weeks since the shock, front-page revelation in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph that her husband had been having a secret six-month affair with a 26-year-old woman and had quit his job as a minister in the NSW state government. These past few weeks have transformed Belinda Neal. The tough-talking federal MP has had to confront her complicity in a neglected marriage, to face her own mistakes and personal failings, and take “a quantum leap” in learning a whole new way to love and be loved, if she wants her 23-year marriage to survive.
“We both love each other and we want to keep building on that,” she says. “We have decided that, despite everything that’s happened, we are the most important people to each other, and … ”, she falters, momentarily, as the words catch in her throat and tears well in her eyes. She takes a deep breath and rushes out the rest of her thought, “and that’s worth maintaining”.
It’s a rare moment of fleeting emotion during an exclusive interview with The Weekly, in which Belinda Neal, a mother of two, reveals her profound shock at her husband’s confession, the couple’s decision to stay together and the pact that she and John, 53, have now made to save their marriage.
She says she has decided to share her story of a cheating husband to help other women understand that their partner’s infidelity in no way devalues them. There is also a woman’s natural desire to regain her dignity, the sensing of an opportunity to rehabilitate her belligerent image.
Read the rest of this story in the October issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly with Tracy Grimshaw on the cover.
Your say: What do you think of Belinda’s decision? How do you work at your relationships? Share your thoughts below.
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