Nil combustibus pro fumo

A mighty peculiar story in the Mail today; apparently...

David Cameron has held crisis talks at Downing Street after being told of allegations of a sensational love affair which has potentially significant political implications for him.

The paper is stingy with the details, beyond the facts that the participants in the “tryst” are middle-aged (whatever that means), neither is in the Cabinet, and the relationship is now over. In fact, there’s so little meat that they’re permitted to serve us that there seems little point in publishing the story, beyond the need to make a point about the whole Leveson thing. Look, Paul Dacre seems to be saying; we’ve got something that’s in the public interest (in the sense at least that the public might be interested in it, in a rather sordid way) but we’d love to be able to tell you, but we’re not allowed. Moreover, in the wake of the Bercow-McAlpine brouhaha, Twitter is a little backward on the gossip-and-guesswork front, innocent faces notwithstanding. The medium that stuck two fingers up at superinjunction-happy lawyers is keeping its hands in its pockets.

So I won’t speculate on any possible identities; except to argue that there’s only one senior Tory not in the Cabinet that anyone cares about, and everyone knows he’s an incontinent shagger anyway, and if there were revelations that put him in a bad light, it could only be good news for Cameron. The funny thing is, the story has arisen just a few days before the 50th anniversary of John Profumo’s resignation from the Commons, following his admission that he had lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler. Is this latest story of the same magnitude, or just a desperately concocted bit of tittle-tattle in order to make us think that newspapers might still be relevant? I have no idea. But some of the hideous images that have been rattling around my imagination since I first read the story are certainly not fit to publish.