David Cameron's heartbroken ex becomes nun named Sister John Mary

London, Apr 29 (ANI): David Cameron's heartbroken former lover, a glamorous blonde who worked in London at Conservative Party HQ with her ambitious young boyfriend, has become a nun called Sister John Mary, it has been revealed.

With her long serge habit, make-up-free face and closely cropped hair hidden by a traditional wimple, she appears indistinguishable from her fellow Benedictine nuns.

Sister John Mary's real name is Laura Adshead. She is a former pupil of 24,000-pound-a-year Cheltenham Ladies' College, from where she went up to Oxford - meeting the current British PM when they were young undergraduates.

Laura dated him from the spring of 1990 until summer 1991, and while he worked at Conservative Central Office, she went on to become the then Prime Minister John Major's correspondence secretary.

Then their lives took different turns. Cameron was selected for political stardom, while Laura left politics to study at the Wharton business school in Philadelphia.

She became an executive in Manhattan for Ogilvy and Mather, the advertising agency that inspired the television drama 'Mad Men' - but the stresses of success, and, perhaps, of personal rejection, finally proved too much for her.

She descended into a world of drinking and addiction before finally finding salvation in God at the abbey in the Connecticut hills, three hours north of New York City.

"I did think my life would progress on the normal tracks of meeting someone, marrying, having children, but that's not the path that God has led me," the Daily Mail quoted her as saying in a new documentary revealing her story.

Photographs are shown of her when she was a young woman, posing in a leopard-skin top, dragging on a cigarette and savouring a glass of wine.

But she admits that her lifestyle then brought her little except loneliness.

"I feel like I tried most things in life that are supposed to make you happy. That journey took me down into alcoholism and drug addiction," she said.

It has been suggested that her downward spiral may have started soon after her break-up from the future Prime Minister.

In a 2007 biography of Cameron, a former colleague of the pair at Conservative headquarters recalled Laura being granted a 'period of compassionate leave' to recover from the heartbreak.

The authors say Cameron was also shaken by the split and its aftermath.

"Perhaps as a result of the fall-out from his affair with Adshead, Cameron thereafter dated women outside politics," the authors said.

Laura later went out with the historian Andrew Roberts, one of Cameron's friends.

When she moved to New York to work as a strategic planning director at Ogilvy and Mather, she found herself part of a social whirl that included aristocratic Europeans and American trust fund heirs.

Newspaper diaries chronicled her presence at society events - at one polo match she mingled with Prince Albert of Monaco, Estee Lauder's granddaughter, Aerin, and a billionaire polo-playing friend of Prince Charles, Peter Brant, who is married to model Stephanie Seymour.

She spent freely, renting a 15,000-pound-a-month summer home with pool and tennis court in the exclusive enclave of The Hamptons on Long Island, regarded as the summer seaside playground of America's wealthy elite.

But by 2008 she had apparently become overwhelmed by problems with substance abuse, and declared that she had decided to become a nun.

"I remember having to tell my mother, "I'm going to join the abbey,'' and she said, "Yes, I can see this world has no real meaning for you any more.'' I looked at this place and saw women who had what I wanted.

"You make a decision here to surrender your life to God," she said.

Laura seems to have embraced the lifestyle wholeheartedly. The film shows the formal ceremony that she went through in order to join the order of nuns.

She is seen dressed in a smart fuchsia dress and knotted pearls - then happily allowing the sisters to untwist her long blonde hair from a bun and cut it back.

A wimple is then placed around her head before she is introduced to the congregation by her new name.

"This is the only place I could see myself being - because this is where it's at," she added.

The film featuring Laura is called 'God Is The Bigger Elvis', the title referring to the convent's Prioress Mother Dolores and her former life, which was also glamorous.

She is a one-time Hollywood starlet, Dolores Hart, who appeared with Elvis Presley in two of his films, 'Lovin' You' and 'King Creole', before entering the order in 1963. (ANI)