After Charlie Elphicke’s sex assault conviction, his wife explains highly controversial decision to back ‘Naughty Tory

He is appealing his sentence and the verdict. I fully support him in that.

Following the trial I was so angry that I marched off, publicly called an end to our marriage and filed for divorce, as I had intended.

I told The Sun of the hurt that had been inflicted on our entire family and how Charlie could get his things and go. It didn’t quite work out like that either. Because Charlie turned up on the doorstep begging to be let in.

It turned out the judge had ordered that he live at our home. And then she immediately went on holiday.

So I had little option but to exile him to the spare room downstairs while I began mentally and physically deleting memories of 25 years of marriage. Charlie, meanwhile, began preparing for the nightmare of being sentenced.

Then calls, letters and cards started rolling in to each of us. He had so many messages of support after the verdict. Person after person messaged about the difference Charlie had made for our community over years of public service.

People wrote of his individual kindnesses and the help he had given to them. Help that had made a real difference in so many cases.

But a consensual affair, however wrongful in his marriage to me, is a very different thing from being accused of sex crimes.

Natalie Elphicke

We discussed his sentence. I looked at the guidelines. It seemed clear to me that community service should be ordered.

A senior probation officer filed a report agreeing a community sentence was appropriate. But always the concern had to be that the court could be on a mission in sentencing, as I believed they had been during the trial.

So he might get sent to jail. And so it has turned out to be. Yet another injustice heaped on so very many that started all the way back when he was denounced publicly in November 2017.

Back then he was not even told by the Chief Whip, who very publicly suspended him, who had made accusations or what they were.

Since then, it has been a shocking and appalling cascade of calamity. The more I saw of the messages of support and the more I saw of Charlie looking after our son, the more I was reminded of the Charlie I met all those years ago.

A great carer and a true giver. A chastened Charlie who asked me to forgive him for the mess he had made of things and his appalling behaviour.

At the same time, I was inundated with people asking me to forgive Charlie and take him back. As things stand, I have not decided on our future together.

I wanted him to continue to co-parent our teenage son while he is growing up. But I can’t consider our future together, and he can’t co-parent our son, because not only was he wrongly convicted — he is now wrongly in jail.

That is one of the reasons I will be supporting his appeal against this wrongful conviction and serious miscarriage of justice."

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