The Wire

It was known as the ‘Knickers in the Ashtray’ affair. Jan Murray is the political wife who went down in Canberra history when she admitted that she and her husband had sex on his ministerial desk. That was in the eighties and caused a storm at the time but Jan Murray’s life has had much larger dramas than that. The mother of five who was married to former Federal Tourism Minister John Brown has been a TV personality, has been arrested, and has suffered mental illness. She’s written about her roller coaster life in a book called Sheer Madness.