Next Gareth will be too.... ======================================== Kernot comeback bid Glenn Milne
April 01, 2007 12:00am Article from: Sunday Herald
CONTROVERSIAL former MP Cheryl Kernot secretly planned to return to politics as a state Labor candidate.
Senior ALP sources confirmed Ms Kernot, the one-time Democrats leader who became a Labor frontbencher, wanted to contest last week's NSW election. Ms Kernot has been living and working in London since it was revealed in 2002 she had been having an affair for five years with former foreign minister Gareth Evans.
Labor sources say an intermediary rang party headquarters last year asking "on Ms Kernot's behalf" if the party was interested in her running. They said they considered the offer, but rejected it as risky, telling the intermediary that Ms Kernot should come and talk to them if and when she returned to Australia.
Ms Kernot had a chequered career as a federal Labor frontbencher. She scraped into Parliament in 1998 in the outer Brisbane seat of Dyckson.
In 1999 she spent three months in hospital suffering from exhaustion.