Gillian Duffy says she will not vote after Gordon Brown's bigot gaffe

Lifelong Labour supporter slighted by prime minister relives her experience in newspaper interview

As he struggles to crawl free of the wreckage of "bigotgate", the prime minister can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the lifelong Labour voter he unwittingly insulted in Rochdale last week is not that upset over being branded as "bigoted" through a treacherous microphone.

The thing that really upset her, explained Gillian Duffy, was being referred to as "that woman".

"It wasn't the bigot, it was that he said 'that woman'," she told yesterday's Mail on Sunday.

"I thought 'what does he mean, that woman?' ... It's not nice, it's not nice at all."

Duffy, 65, said that although she had accepted Gordon Brown's apology, she had refused to shake his hand in front of the cameras last week.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the prime minister made his unguarded remarks in the back of his Jaguar limousine last Wednesday, Duffy also confirmed that she had decide not to vote in the general election.

Brown's decision to apologise to Duffy by phone - and to follow it up with a visit to her home, 12 miles from his Manchester hotel - showed how seriously Labour were taking the gaffe.

Duffy said that when the prime minister came to her house, she told him: "I'm sorry for you, Gordon, because you have more to lose than me. I'm very sorry that this has happened but it's you who's going to lose out, not me."

She said she was shocked by the episode but felt more sad than angry about what happened.

Brown also discussed the encounter in an interview published in the Sunday Mirror yesterday.

"I hope I've made things up with her," he said. "I made a mistake. I apologised. It was right to go to see her and I feel a misunderstanding was corrected. She seemed willing to accept that. I hope that's so."

Writing in the same paper, Brown's wife, Sarah, said her husband would "forever regret" his comments about Duffy, but admitted the mistake was typical of "the sort of incidents" that happened on the campaign trail.

"I wasn't with Gordon at the time, but I could tell from the tone of his voice when he called me that he'd done something he felt mortified about," she wrote.

"If there's one thing everyone who knows him agrees on about Gordon, it's that he simply hates upsetting people. The idea that somebody would have been caused pain or embarrassment by something he had done is the sort of thing that goes right to the core of Gordon and I know that his apology came straight from his heart."