Elizabeth Edwards told cheating John not to run

Senator John Edwards, the Democrat who resigned from the race for the White House last year after the media exposed him for cheating on his wife when she was terminally ill with bone cancer, gets an unwelcome boot back into the public arena this week when Elizabeth Edwards, still alive, publishes a memoir, Resilience.

She is due to go on the Oprah show to publicise the book and say what she thinks of the younger woman who seduced her husband, Rielle Hunter. In the book, she doesn't name Hunter, but dismisses her rival as "pathetic" and says she seduced her husband outside a New York hotel with the corny come-on: "You are so hot". Oprah Winfrey's fans will be expecting more.

According to Elizabeth Edwards (pictured above with her husband in June 2008), her husband admitted to her privately in 2006 that he had had an affair with Hunter, a blonde videographer who had previously dated the novelist Jay McInerney.

Edwards apparently made the confession within days of announcing that he would be running for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Elizabeth says she advised him immediately to quit the race because she was convinced the news would leak. "He should not have run," she writes.

But Barack Obama had barely been heard of and Edwards, who had been John Kerry's running mate in 2004, looked like a potential winner. He ignored his wife's advice and went ahead. And Elizabeth never let on, allowing the media to paint a portrait of a loving marriage, the candidate's wife tragically dying from cancer.

When the National Enquirer revealed the affair, Edwards insisted there was no truth in it. But when they caught him red-handed, visiting Hunter and her daughter at a Los Angeles hotel in the middle of the night, Edwards finally threw in the towel.

However, the politician has refused to acknowledge the further twist that he is the father of Hunter's daughter, Frances - and Elizabeth Edwards's book does not address the paternity issue.

Hunter, who now lives in New Jersey, is said to be contemplating writing her own memoir. ·