Jack Straw lends a hand to Jade Goody

No one, not even those who hold the highest office in the land, can avoid being caught up in Jade Goody’s grisly melodrama. On Thursday, the Prime Minister was impelled to utter words of sympathy to Goody, who has terminal cancer, after being ambushed by the Sun newspaper at a press conference about his plans to lead Britain towards economic recovery. Now Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, has made an entrance, pledging to adjust Goody's fiance Jack Tweed's bail conditions so the couple can marry on Sunday and spend their first night of marital bliss together.

The terms of Tweed's curfew, imposed following his release last month from an 18-month prison sentence for assault, will be changed to reflect the "exceptional" circumstances, a spokesman for the Justice Secretary said, adding that Goody had "shown extraordinary courage and our thoughts are with her".

The 27-year-old, who won Channel 4's reality television show Big Brother in 2002, learned she had cancer last August. It has since spread and earlier this month she was apparently told that she has only a short time to live. So she has decided to marry Tweed at a country house hotel in Hertfordshire.

According to the Guardian, she is set to raise £1m from a series of media deals - including £700,000 for television and picture rights to coverage of her wedding by OK! magazine - to help support her two children after her death.

Goody is a controversial figure. She was vilified for making racist remarks about Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood actress with whom she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, and for her apparent ignorance - she assumed East Anglia was somewhere 'abroad'. But the way she has dealt with her cancer has won her considerable popular support. Straw and Brown, not too popular with anyone themselves right now, cannot afford to ignore her.
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