News: Tommy Sheridan perjury trial: The Joan Burnie verdict - Scottish Daily Record

Dec 24 2010 By Joan Burnie

IT'S OVER. The jury have returned their verdict and can go home to their turkey, thankful that after 12 seemingly endless weeks, they are free.

And Gail Sheridan has been released from what has become her daily ritual, that public trudge into the High Court under the barrage of photographers' f lashlights.

Even at the end of the trial, Gail was as immaculate as she was defiant.

The lips were ever smiling, even if her eyes, sometimes hidden behind dark glasses, told a different tale. But always, always, she was arm in arm with her husband.

It was Team Sheridan united, she and her Tommy against the world - and it still is.

Nothing has changed, she says. She still believes in his innocence. She stands by her man. Now and forever.

So, for the last time, they left the court together.

Gail has her Tommy home for Christmas. The promise to their daughter, Gabrielle, has been kept.

Goodness knows how much the five-year-old understands although, like all kids of her age, right this moment the main man in her life will be Santa.

Gail will make sure the child has a happy day with both her parents and their extended families around them.

But soon, too soon, she will have to explain to their daughter that her daddy won't be here next Christmas, nor the one after that. Perjury does not carry a community sentence.

I don't doubt that, once again, Gail will rise to the challenge, wrap it up as best she can.

And she will not, not for one single minute, criticise Gabrielle's father.

However, nothing she says can conceal that the fantasy Tommy wove around them, of the devoted family man, has, like a fragile glass bauble on the tree, been shattered forever.

Gail must live for the foreseeable future not only without her husband but with the knowledge that he has been found guilty not just of perjury but of lying to her.

So what does this strong woman, the one who said that Tommy would be in the Clyde if the stories about him were true, do now? Will she continue to believe it was all a conspiracy, that her Tommy has been a totally faithful husband? Will she insist the infamous tape was a fake, concocted by a dissident, disaffected cabal within the SSP, for no other reason than jealousy? My guess is that publicly she will continue to maintain that Tommy has her total and complete support.

I interviewed Gail just before her marriage in 2000. I wrote at the time that she talked about her soon-to-be husband not so much as a partner but almost as if he was her adored son.

And a mother's love and loyalty are notoriously boundless.

So my belief is that Gail will behave in the months and even years ahead as if Tommy is a political prisoner.

But in private, especially at night, when she finally lies alone and lonely in their double bed, will she let herself accept that Tommy is no martyr but just another cheating husband caught with his marriage vows down? Personally, I don't think she will. She can't afford to. Because to admit that she is a wronged wife, even to herself, would mean admitting that their entire relationship was a lie.

And I don't think this proud woman, who married her husband in the sight of God, for worse as well as better, could allow herself to do that.

Poor Gail has to go on - despite the verdict and the excruciating evidence - believing in Tommy and their perfect marriage.

Perhaps because it is the ONLY way she can go on at all.