‘The world is getting to be such a dangerous place, a man is lucky to get out of it alive’.

Poor old Willie Hague seems doomed to employ the world’s worst PR spinners. The outrageous Amanda Platell did for him by getting him to pose in a silly baseball cap, attend a Gay Pride march, and boast of drinking 14 pints of beer a day when he was a lad. Now we have his disastrous public statement about his Special Advisor and all that guff about his marriage. This gave the story legs; without it the whole fiasco would be over. Who cares if he walks on both sides of the street? There have been whispers amongst the chatterati that Willie’s sexuality has been a matter of speculation since he made his well-remembered speech at the Tory Party conference when he was only 16 because he never had anything to do with girls. Why? It seems much more likely that Willie never thought about rumpy-pumpy because he only ever thought about politics. He married the charming Fi when he became Welsh Secretary; she was a prominent member of the Taffia.

An excess of testosterone is part of the essential make-up of a politician. Exposures of toe sucking, copulating in a Manchester United football shirt, self-starring porno videos made within the hallowed precincts of Westminster, ‘Shagger’ Norris with his plethora of concurrent mistresses, Jeremy Thorpe and the Great Dane, Mandelson and his Latino catamite, fatalities during weird sex-games, and John Prescott laying his secretary (anything is possible, even that unlikely episode) – I tell you, it’s like the Ball of Kirriemuir’ in there. Going back further, we had the Profumo Affair, and Harold Macmillan’s wife was the long-standing mistress of Bob Boothby who sodomised the queer Kray brother when Dorothy was not about. Ambidextrous was our Bob. These guys are game for anything as long as it stands still long enough. I don’t care, although I draw the line at the strange activities of one (ex) Lib-Dem MP whose tastes ran to rent boys and excrement. But I guess some of the women MPs will die wondering.

The Great Pakistani Cricket Scam will not go away, either. It now emerges that the Old Bill has been following the go-between for months. It will be a very complicated enquiry, so there won’t be any closure in the short term. If the players are charged in London, which now seems increasingly likely, they will be bailed. The intriguing question is whether they will answer bail and return from Pakistan to face trial. If they don’t, I foresee the future of Pakistan cricket as being extremely uncertain. The Pakistani authorities have handled this appallingly, with the High Commissioner suggesting that the News of the World video was a fake. Bad move. The News of the Screws will be all over him now. England have been playing international cricket since the 1870s, but big money and big temptation only arrived with satellite TV coverage a few years ago. The rot centres on the Indian sub-continent because that is where the illegal bookies operate.

Interestingly, a week-end opinion poll showed overwhelming support for Willie; the vast majority believed him to be telling the truth (as opinion polls of politicians’ veracity are concerned, this one should get in the Guinness Book of Records). The wisdom of issuing the Press Statement was about equally divided, although my firm practice has always been to follow the military maxim ‘never explain, never complain, never apologise’. The ST did a good commentary piece about voter hypocrisy and the prurient interest in the admittedly diverse and inexhaustible sex lives of politicians. Of course, this can cut both ways. If Edwina Currie had published her memoirs revealing not just her affair with John Major but also the impressive contents of his Y-fronts in 1996, he might have won in 1997. When rumours spread during an election campaign in eighteen hundred and frozen stiff that Lord Palmerston had been caught in flagrante delicto in his 80s, the leader of the opposition said ‘Don’t let it get out; he’ll sweep the country’.

This seems to be ‘Gotcha’ time in UK politics. Andy Coulson, Dave’s spinmeister, is also under the spotlight, with the comrades implying that he is or has been deeply involved in hacking into MPs’ mobile phones. He was accused of this when he was Editor of the Screws of the World, but exonerated – or rather it was ‘not proven’. The deeper question is what Dave thought he was doing in appointing the head hack of the lowest of the Red Tops apart from Sunday Sport.

I have not seen any reference to Dr Kelly in the Blair apologia; he does observe that the Queen was ‘haughty, which I take to mean that she was not impressed with Tone’s charm or Cherie’s vulgarity. When Cherie asked Princess Anne to call her ‘Cherie’, HRH replied that ‘Mrs Blair’ would do fine. Ouch. But the masterwork is flying off the shelves, to the benefit of old soldiers. Tone admits that it was deliberate policy to encourage immigration purely for the sake of enticing the Tories to react adversely so that he could shout ‘nasty party’ again. The Tories were not falling into that obvious trap. But when immigration became a major issue in this year’s election, Cameroon said that a Tory government would bring it under control with a system of quotas and vouchers, and all others would be deported.

A slight snag here. Immigrants from Eastern European countries that are members of the EU can’t be sent home. Back to the drawing board, Dave. Tsarkozy is up to the same stunt to repair his terrible ratings. He is beating his little chest and chucking out the Roma. They will just come back again, as they are entitled, but it does boost the wee chap’s Napoleonic image, which needs all the help it can get. And a new book implies that la grande horizontale might have to be buried in a Y-shaped coffin.

A revealing comment from Blair when asked why he never sacked the awful Broon was that it would have split the Labour Party; instead he merely ruined the country. So that’s alright, then.

Returning to the theme of the danger to one’s freedom of telling Irish jokes, we came back from Cape Town in 1991 on the ‘Canberra’. The resident comedian was a Paddy (pardon, Irish male) called Pat Noonan. He told the story of going into a bar in Dublin. The barman told him it was the ‘holy hour’, the one time during the day when pubs were not allowed to serve. ‘Then I’ll wait until you open’ said Pat. The barman replied ‘Will you have a drink while you’re waiting?’ Some years later I went into a pub in Waterford with my son-in-law, Paddy Keogh (no kidding). He ordered two pints of Guinness. The barmaid said that the pub was not open for another quarter of an hour. Paddy said in that case we would wait. Can you guess what the barmaid replied? Goddit in one. Truly life follows art, as that great Paddy, Oscar Wilde, memorably said.

Quote of the week.

"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."