James Gray has spoken of his sadness at his affair in his weekly Gazette column, and has added his determination to continue his duties his his constituency.

I hope that my constituents will in the fullness of time come to realise my very great sadness at the damage which my personal behaviour has caused to Sarah and my family. I very much regret it, and will be doing what I can to try to heal their wounds. But I hope that you will also understand and accept my view that an MP's private life really should be exactly that -private. When marriages sadly end, as mine has now done, that is agony enough without it being conducted in the glare of publicity which we have had over the least week or two. The media circus helps no-one. So I will be doing my best to carry out my Constituency duties in as quiet and conscientious way as I can over the next weeks and months, and hope that the media - and my constituents alike - will allow Sarah and me and the family time and space and privacy and understanding to try to sort out the rest of our lives. To that end, I hope that you will also understand that I will be making no further comment of any kind at all about my private life.

But it has led me to a few thoughts about the media, and its place in our society. By and large, the reporting of the last week has been accurate and relatively sensitive, if of course deeply painful reading for me. This newspaper, in particular, and its editor, Gary Lawrence, who broke the story, and for which I give him no thanks, nonetheless did it in a responsible and fair way. And I pay tribute to him for that. Radio Wiltshire's Chippenham reporter, Barbara Gale, and the Western Daily Press's Tristan Cork are also thoroughly responsible journalists, who handled the matter well. I wish I could say the same about some of the national tabloids, and some of the news agencies, whose reporting was intrusive and unnecessary. At the time, my reaction was to blame them and be really quite upset about the behaviour of some of them.

But then I had a few other thoughts. First of all, had I not done what I did, there wouldn't have been a story. Second, these people are professional journalists and photographers. Their job is to get a story and a picture. But they are also by and large decent human beings. One of them even rang me the next day to apologise for having turned up at my house with a TV crew! And third, of course, they are merely supplying a market. If we buy newspapers with lurid stories in them, then they will keep trying to track down lurid stories. So maybe we shouldn't blame the messenger.

And there's a wider message here too. People often criticise the media for "being too powerful. "It's the Sun wot won it,'' blared the headline after John Major's rather surprise General Election victory in 1992. And the same newspaper's switch to Mr Blair in subsequent General Elections is often credited with helping with his landslide victories. But are the media leading public opinion, or are they reflecting it? Their job is to sell newspapers, and if their reporting or editing or leader writing is too much at odds with the views of the public, then they will fail in that prime duty.

So despite my recent personal experiences, I remain a strong supporter of the freedom of the press to track down stories, to report them and to comment on them in a free and untrammelled way. And despite everything, I remain a firm believer that we enjoy some of the most professional journalists in the world, and some of the best media. So I won't hold it against any of them, while nonetheless appealing to them, and to all of you, to accept my regrets at what has happened, to allow me to carry on with my job both in the Constituency and in Parliament in as professional way as I can, and above all to leave Sarah and the family in peace.