Neat timing as Edwards admits to lovechild

The former Demoratic Senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards has confessed to fathering the infant girl he has virulently denied for two years, thus proving that even a narcissistic politician best known for $400 haircuts can sometimes tell the truth.

Edwards, 56 but always primped and pampered to look 40, finally owned up to fathering Frances Quinn Hunter, almost two, on the morning TV show Today.

She is the issue of his affair with documentary videographer Rielle Hunter, which Edwards lied about with equal vigour when it was  revealed by the dirt-digging National Enquirer early in his 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The question is: why is he confessing now? He has zero chance of political rehabilitation, despised for his treatment of Elizabeth Edwards, the wife who was canonised for gamely supporting his campaign despite a diagnosis of terminal breast cancer.

The clue is in the timing. Serious doubts over Elizabeth's saintliness have been cast by Game Change, the no-holds-barred book on the 2008 campaign by reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin which is the talk of Washington. This is Edwards's chance to get even.

And on February 2, his former aide Andrew Young comes out with a book called The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's  Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down. With a title like that, all else you need to know is that it was Young who was initially persuaded to claim that he was the father of Hunter's child.

Edwards made his multi-million dollar fortune as a 'personal injury' trial lawyer, and there is no more lucrative skill for an ambulance-chaser that knowing when to take the stand.

On Today, he offered the usual performance of hand-wringing mea culpa. "To all those I have disappointed and hurt," he said, "these words will never be enough. But I am truly sorry."

He admitted that it "was wrong of me ever to deny she [Frances] was my daughter," and boasted that he would now "do everything in my power to provide her with the love and support she deserves." He even hoped that, one day, little Quinn might forgive him.

How could so saintly a lady as Elizabeth Edwards be married faithfully to such a heel?

Perhaps, suggest the Game Change authors, the answer lies in "the disparity between public image and private reality", which has never been "vaster or more disturbing".

They describe a woman who was "abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, a crazy woman," who was "prone to irrational outburst". She loved nothing more than to berate Edwards as a "redneck" who was ignorant and never sat down to read a book.

On the day she stood by her man for the cameras, the couple actually fought furiously – "they were fighting all the time, sometimes all night long" – in the car on the way to their local airport. They stormed into the private boarding lounge, shouting so loud that they had to take the battle outside into the car park.

There Elizabeth, chasing Edwards, ripped off her shirt to expose herself as the cancer victim, shouting "Look at me!"  This scene was not recorded in her own memoir, Resilience, published last summer.

Heilemann and Halperin could find no one on the Edwards campaign with a kind word to say about her, particularly because of her habit of yelling abuse the loudest at the lowliest staff.

At least Senator Edwards was providing amusement for Republican John McCain. Game Change has McCain and friends on the campaign bus splitting their sides laughing as he repeatedly plays a four-minute YouTube video of Edwards tending his coiffure in a television studio, caught on camera utterly absorbed in his image.

It was Edwards's defining moment. ·