IT HAS been one of the best-kept secrets of the presidential election campaign. Julia Thorne, the first wife of John Kerry, the Democrat candidate, has been suffering from cancer.

After months of treatment out of the public eye, she has now been declared cancer-free and has returned to her home in Montana.

Thorne is considering writing a book about her experience of illness, but not until after the November election. “She is somebody who has written books before and has a lot to share with people,” a family friend said.

If the past is a guide, she may include some acerbic thoughts on the political campaign. Thorne, who married Kerry in 1970 and divorced in 1988, so hated being a political wife that she became severely depressed.

“I associated politics only with anger, loneliness and fear,” she wrote in her 1996 book on divorce, A Change of Heart.

In another book, on depression, she described how she had contemplated suicide. “Five months after my 36th birthday, my mind ravaged by corroding voices, my body defeated by bone-rattling panics, I sat on the edge of my bed minutes from taking my own life.”

Kerry’s bid for the White House brought the press back to her door, but while daughters Alexandra and Vanessa Kerry took to campaigning with gusto, Thorne, 60, remained out of the limelight. Her cancer treatment, which began last November at an East Coast hospital, went unreported.

“She has been enormously stressed and very grateful that people have respected her privacy,” her friend added. Thorne will still have to return to hospital for check-ups.

A spokesman for the Kerry campaign said Alexandra, 30, and Vanessa, 27, had “plenty of opportunities to spend time with their mom”, despite their hectic political schedule. “They are very pleased that she is doing so well.”

The mainstream media have kept their distance from Kerry’s personal life and, in particular, his marriage to Thorne. Like his second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, she was an heiress: her family was worth an estimated $300m. Her twin brother David Thorne was Kerry’s best friend at Yale University.

Some right-wing commentators have made hay with Kerry’s relationships, however. One of the most biting, Ann Coulter, has blasted the candidate as “just a gigolo”, “living off other men’s money by marrying their wives and daughters”.

Republican dirty tricks may intensify now that Thorne has recovered from her illness. On Rush Limbaugh’s hugely popular and ultra-conservative radio show, an advertisement about the candidate’s “flip-flops” — a persistent Republican theme — dominates most commercial breaks. The ad purports to sell anti-Kerry playing cards but is really an excuse to knock the candidate before an audience of millions.

To the theme tune of Flipper, the film about a dolphin, the narrator goes straight for the jugular: “He flip-flopped on his marriage of 18 years . . .” then turns to alleged “flip-flops” on policy.

Long after his divorce, Kerry went on to annul his marriage to Thorne in deference to his second wife, a Catholic. While Thorne did not contest the annulment, believing her husband had the right to remarry, she made no secret of her bitterness about the procedure.

“It was disrespectful to me, it was aloof to any emotional issues and devoid of any sense of the humanity of what this means to me and the children,” said Thorne.

Friends have been reluctant to revisit this episode out of loyalty to Thorne and political support for Kerry. In one of her few public comments, Thorne herself has said she is backing Kerry 100% for the presidency.

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