Shared Opinion
Nick Clegg’s sex confession shows why politicians should never try to look normal
Happily not. It would have been a dodgy one if it were. Libel laws aside, there’s a fine line between a hoax and an outright lie. Clegg and the elk lovechild, that could have been an April Fool. Nick Clegg and 3,000 lovers, maybe. Clegg and 30 is just too plausible. Or is it? How many lovers is normal for a political leader? Until David Cameron next appears on local news, we may never know.
And yet I was concerned. So just before filing this, I had a quick check to see if there was anything else in the Tuesday papers I could write about, if everything fell apart. Blimey. Loads. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has been invited to join Gordon Brown’s government of all the talents, Robert Mugabe is pretending there wasn’t an election, Harriet Harman is to do PMQs, the BBC has made a documentary about flying penguins, Gordon Ramsay is banning swearing in his restaurants. It’s all go.
Some must be hoaxes. But which? On page 18, the Sun had a picture of a turtle who was addicted to cigarettes. Two pages later, there is a story about Nicolas Sarkozy getting stretched in order to be as tall as his wife. Two hoaxes? No hoaxes? The reader feels like Orwell’s creatures at the end of Animal Farm. We look from pig to man, and from man to pig, but it is already impossible to say which is which.
Hugo Rifkind Is A Writer For The Times.
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Blue Porcupine
April 3rd, 2008 1:42pm"I didn’t start it. Nick Clegg did."
Oh no he didn't! Well-known prurient plonker Piers Moron did. "Ten, twenty, thirty?" he slavered eagerly. We must be grateful for small mercies that Clegg managed to stop him before he went any higher and/or started frothing at the mouth, whichever was to come first.
And it's no good pointing to the drugs question either - (a) because it came after the sex question and (b) because everyone ever to feature on a parish council ballot paper has been asked the stock drugs question and knows the stock drugs answer in their sleep.
Nice column, mind.
Harry Osbourne
April 4th, 2008 8:25pmPoor sad, immature, vulgar unthinking Nick. A man of our times; not a man to change them.
Its a pity Piers didn't deflate our (moderaterly) great lover by further asking whether he had taken necessary precautions and sought post coital medical checks. The answers to these questions would have provided more insight into Clegg's psyche than a mere head count.