EMBATTLED North-East MP Stephen Byers was last night offered a lifeline by his constituency colleagues following revelations about the former minister's sex life.

Senior figures in his constituency party publicly defended the North Tyneside MP after details of his one-night stand with a Merseyside councillor surfaced in Sunday newspapers.

Salacious details of the then Transport Minister's fling with Barbara Corish, a 52-year-old Labour Party member from Sefton, were printed in yesterday's News Of The World.

Mr Byers, who is in Crete for a sunshine break with his long-term partner Jan Cookson, is due to return to the UK on Thursday.

The couple, who share a £250,000 home in the Fenham area of Newcastle, have been together for 15 years.

A statement issued by the pair yesterday said: "We talked together at the time about what had happened between Steve and Barbara.

"This is a private matter and we will not be making any other public comment."

But Mr Byers' election agent Eddie Darke was quick to defend his under-fire MP and said the affair should not affect Mr Byers's future as Labour MP for the seat.

"My view is his private life is his private life - I don't know anything about it.

"He is a first class MP. That's all that counts to me."

And while Mr Darke said he did not know how other party members would react to the latest episode involving their accident-prone MP, he added: "I have not talked to anybody. I am just reading it myself.

"People in the party know what newspapers are like so it won't cloud their judgement one way or the other.

"I would have thought they would want him to continue as MP because they judge him on his politics, not his private life, and this is nothing to do with politics."

Ms Corish said she had had her brief affair with Mr Byers at Labour's Local Government and Women's Conference in Cardiff - where Prime Minister Tony Blair was a guest speaker - in February.

The pair had already met at an earlier Labour gathering where the BT foreign accounts adviser had her picture taken with the then Transport Secretary.

Ms Corish said she met him at the bar of Cardiff's Marriott hotel at about 11pm, and an hour later invited him back to her hotel.

Mr Byers, who has a 28-year-old son from a previous relationship, was dogged by bad publicity before finally quitting his Cabinet post last month.

He endured a torrid year beginning with criticism over the state of the railways in the wake of the Hatfield disaster.

This intensified when he pulled the financial plug on Railtrack and effectively put the company into administration - incurring the wrath of shareholders.

His problems got even worse in October last year when it was revealed that his spin doctor, Jo Moore, had sent an e-mail suggesting September 11 was a good day to "bury" bad news.

Mr Byers held onto office until May, only to resign the day after the Transport Select Committee savaged his ten-year transport plan.

Many commentators were surprised when he quit, having survived so much.

But within two weeks, further allegations emerged that officials within his transport department had attempted to check the political affiliations of members of the Paddington rail crash survivors' group.