MORE SEX PLEASE, WE’RE BRITISH

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘French flu’ but it was coined in the 1950s by an Eastern European intellectual who found sanctuary from Soviet tanks in London and then became incredulous at the way English brain-boxes ceaselessly put down their own country in comparison with France. As with many Left-wing men today who somehow seem to end up on the side of woman-haters from transies to Isis, you might almost believe that it was because of, rather than despite, these groups misogyny that right-on-Johns had such a soft spot for them because of, as I wrote in the Spectator: ‘Suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism which they could never in a million years admit to. After years of being yelled at by female comrades whenever they inquired about the likelihood of a hot beverage being imminent, imagine how excited they must get watching big bad men in balaclavas selling ‘slave girls’ in a sweltering marketplace…’

Once you’ve ticked the box saying Brotherhood of Man, you can do what you want to women and girls from behind our old friend the Wokescreen, as every liberal lecher from Harvey ‘I’m A Feminist’ Weinstein to a good part of the United Nations (who seem unable to see a national disaster without sending a crack team of sexual exploiters in, leading to around 2,000 allegations against them in a decade, the organisation itself acknowledging that ‘peacekeepers have come to be seen as part of the problem in trafficking rather than the solution’) has proven. Who cares that Frenchwomen didn’t get the vote until 1945 or that until 1975 the French Penal (sic!) Code permitted a husband murdering his wife and/or her lover while catching them doing the deed to escape with the lightest of sentences? So long as a porcine politician can roll around with some fancy piece between 'Cinq à sept’ they’ll still get the wink from the hypocritical Great and The Good over here - even if they smoke indoors afterwards.

But let Boris Johnson get married a few times (three times to be precise - the same as Jeremy Corbyn and me) and the hitherto sophisticates are bleating ‘O, but what about poor Marina?’ and falling down on our fainting couches. I know that we were all meant to be tut-tutting about how Carrie Symonds violated the gormless Girl Code while kindly bystanders waft smelling salts under our fragile noses, but in my opinion all’s fair in love and war. And, of course, Boris’s ex-wife Marina Wheeler was banging him while he was still married to his first wife, Allegra. What goes around comes around, especially on the sexual carousel of the metropolitan elite.

Additionally, it’s extremely babyish to bleat 'Ooo, if he'd lie to his wife, he'd lie to the world!' If he was successful in lying to his wife, he might also be good at lying to our international rivals, thus giving the country he is paid to serve an advantage. It’s such a prissy, reductive view of life; faithful husbands often make rotten leaders - Nixon, Cameron - while bounders can be great ones - Lloyd George, Kennedy. Once in a while you get a great leader who’s also faithful - Churchill - but that’s probably because he was too depressed to be interested in sex. You might as well say doctors who commit adultery can't be trusted not to muck about with their patients.

In the past, it was only when politicians talked about *family values* (which always makes me think of a budget-conscious supermarket) while banging one of their cabinet that the charge of hypocrisy could be brought. But with the Covid came a new kind of duplicity which made the clinches of Major and Currie look like kid stuff. The photograph of the full-on teenage snog which the minister and his miss were engaged in was taken when even a manly hug outside of one’s ‘bubble’ was banned, let alone what we used to call Wandering Hands Syndrome.

So in the end, it was right that Hancock should leave to spend more time with his divorce lawyers, and not just because he had condemned the extra-curricular activities of priapic prof Niall Ferguson so prissily last year. For it was he who oversaw measures which meant that beloved parents died alone care homes, un-held whilst he put his hands all over an employee, and he who preached abstinence - backed by the force of law - whilst doing exactly as he pleased. Laughter - our national pastime - would have seen Hancock off in the end, even if his name wasn’t already in on the joke. Even the driest parliamentary commentator might have stumbled over references to Big Ben, the Woolsack, Black Rod’s Entrance Garden, Honorable Members, Statutory Instruments, Whips/Whipping and being In Session had such a flagrant adulterer been left in such a position of power.

It’s good that faulty politicians should be driven out by the mockery of the masses - not by the pearl-clutching of the liberal establishment, who would have found nothing amiss whatsoever had he been French. What brought him down was one of humanity’s finer instincts - love and protectiveness towards the old and frail, whereas in the animal kingdom we’d let them die and eat them - and not the peevish envy which is piqued by the thought that someone, somewhere, is having more sex than us.