A brief history of harlots

I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to Patmos, an island so difficult to get to, it has kept the great unwashed away. From now it is the only island I will grace with my presence, until the next time, that is.

It was Kipling who quipped about journalists having ‘power without responsibility’. He then added the phrase ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’, which was repeated by Stanley Baldwin, not Stanley Johnson. Comparing hacks to harlots is, of course, unfair to the girls. Some of them have risen to the highest offices in the past due to their discretion, whereas the only journalist I know who made it to the top is our very own Boris. Hookers are more to be trusted than hacks, insisted my late father, who also claimed that whores enjoyed a seismographic alertness to future winners which far exceeds that of the hacks.

The definition of the word ‘prostitute’ is a man or a woman who indulges in sexual intercourse for money. But more to the point, it is someone who debases his or her talent in the pursuit of money, and this extends to writers, painters and of course journalists. Needless to say, newspapers and TV networks also fall into this category, from the BBC and NBC to the biggest one of all, CNN.

I remember when, back in 1963, people wondered how John Profumo, a cabinet minister, could betray his beautiful film star wife Valerie Hobson for a part-time hooker, Christine Keeler. How little they knew. The lovelier the wife, the more fun it is to cheat. Tom Wolfe called it ‘nostalgie de la boue’. Yet it is an unjust world, because although Profumo was justly rehabilitated, Christine ended up an outcast and broke.