Fire and grace: Natalie Joyce tells all before moment of compassion

Natalie Joyce showed her husband the meaning of compassion when she drew the former deputy PM into her arms at his brother’s funeral.

Natalie Joyce. Picture: Australian Women’s Weekly

Natalie Joyce showed her husband the meaning of compassion when she drew the former deputy prime minister into her arms at his brother’s funeral, putting aside all the hurt and humiliation he had inflicted through his ­infidelity.

Mrs Joyce made good on her pledge in a tell-all interview published yesterday that the “door would be open” for Barnaby Joyce whenever he needed her and their daughters.

The family came together to mourn the death of Mr Joyce’s younger brother, Tim, on the day that Mrs Joyce cut loose over the affair he had conducted with his former media adviser, Vikki Campion, now the mother of a baby brother to the four girls they had raised.

Where Mr Joyce and his 32-year-old lover obfuscated in their paid interview with the Seven Network, aired on June 3, Mrs Joyce was witheringly direct, ­recounting her attempts to save the 24-year marriage and warn off a “frighteningly ambitious” Ms Campion. “She wanted my life from the get-go,” said Mrs Joyce, 48, laying bare her anger.

Yet she was nothing but supportive as she hugged a bereaved Mr Joyce, 51, on the steps of St Mary’s Catholic Church in North Sydney, with their oldest daughter, Bridgette, 21, looking on. Ms Campion did not attend the ­funeral.

Describing the moment when she confronted the young woman in March last year, after her husband had stopped coming home, Mrs Joyce said in an interview for this month’s edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly: “I was very measured and made sure I didn’t raise my voice.

“She and Barney were smoking outside. He bolted when he saw me.

“I turned to her and said, ‘My ­husband is out of bounds, off-­limits, he’s a married man with four children,’ and then I called her a homewrecking whore. It was not one of my finer moments but, looking back, I’m proud I stood up to her.”

Vikki Campion with Barnaby Joyce and their baby son Sebastian.

Mrs Joyce, 48, said she cottoned on to the “worst-kept secret” in Canberra that he was having an affair with Ms Campion when she saw them together at a Christmas party in 2016, about seven months after the vivacious aide joined his ministerial staff.

“I was probably the last silly mug to know,” she said.

Last September, after she gave her wedding ring back to Mr Joyce, she said he begged for another chance.

“He said, ‘Nat, give me a week. I thought I had this sorted. I love you — you know that — I just f..ked up’. Now a week later I got the news: Vikki was pregnant.

“My world came crashing down,” Mrs Joyce remembered. “I chose not to tell our girls — Caroline was doing her HSC, Odette was in Year 9 at boarding school, Bridgette was in third-year commerce and international relations and Jules was in first-year criminology. They didn’t need to know until I had time to work out when and how to tell them.”

At an emotional meeting at the family home in Tamworth, NSW, Mrs Joyce said she had asked her husband to return. When he said he couldn’t, that he had “to be there for his son”, Mrs Joyce said she went “wild”.

“I said, ‘What about our daughters?’ He always wanted a boy and, while the girls really are the epicentre of his universe, we had no chance: she was giving him a son.”

Compounding her distress, they called him Sebastian, the name she and Mr Joyce had picked out for the boy they never had. “It felt like another malicious taunt in a very long line of appalling behaviour,” she said.

Their daughters, aged 15-21, had not met their new brother but the decision was up to them, and she would support the girls whatever they chose to do.

Mrs Joyce said she wanted them to have a “loving relationship” with their father, and the door would always be open to him, as she showed yesterday.

“Despite everything, we’re here,” she said.

But she was “very clear that woman will never be in our lives”, referring to Ms Campion. Mr Joyce’s media spokesman said the backbench MP had nothing to say in response.

Explaining why she had broken her silence with the Weekly, which insisted the interview was unpaid, in contrast to the $150,000 reportedly outlaid by the Seven Network, Mrs Joyce said she wanted the girls to know she had stood up to defend their “fine name” after their father’s TV appearance with his new family.

“I am normally a very private person but knew I had to find my voice,” she said. “They thought I would lie down, but this time, I couldn’t. Before the critics label me the scorned ex-wife or a ­pathetic victim or imply that this is some sort of revenge attack — and before any ridiculous suggestion of ours being a loveless marriage — I want to say, for the record, that nothing could be more wrong.

“I’m doing this so the girls will feel empowered and know their mum stood up and defended our fine name. I want to give them plenty of reasons to feel proud of at least one of their parents … I can put on my ‘big girl pants’ and wear the constant king hits, but it’s not fair that our four daughters suffer at the hands of their father’s ­betrayal. Our girls are the real victims here.”

Mrs Joyce resisted the temptation to exact revenge on her husband when she was approached by the Family First party to stand in his seat of New England in the by-election triggered last year by his disqualification from parliament for holding joint New Zealand ­citizenship.

For “all his faults”, she said Mr Joyce was a fine politician and she would have been an “idiot” to go up against him in the northwest NSW electorate, which he ­retained in a landslide on December 2.

As the political pressure bore down, she had tried to keep up appearances, going along with efforts to paper over the yawning cracks in their marriage. At Ms Campion’s insistence, she had accompanied the then deputy PM to the glamorous midwinter ball at Parliament House last June 14, where “the photos of us smiling and happy couldn’t be further from the truth … he hardly spoke to me”.

Mr Joyce was at his 42-year-old brother’s side when Tim Joyce died from cancer last weekend. In a text to broadcaster Alan Jones, which was read on air, Mr Joyce described how his brother “looked at the ceiling and said, ‘Thank you, god, for giving me the experience of life’. Then he faded out and we said the rosary around him. He was such an innocent, loving boy”.