Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney, and a hate that dare not speak its name

How weird are Scientologists? Other than the bright-eyed young men in sharp suits on Tottenham Court Road — who have somehow spotted my glaring personality problems at a distance and are adamant that I ought to step inside and identify them in more detail — I’ve never knowingly met one, so I don’t really know.

My hunch, though, would be fairly. It’s not everybody who can go through life believing themselves to be covered in millions of tiny aliens which a tyrant called Xenu once stacked around volcanoes which he then detonated with hydrogen bombs. Mind you, I once went to a decent-sized town in Guatemala where they worship a plank in a hat by giving it cigarettes. So you never know.

Often, I’ve thought that everybody mocks Scientologists so much because they tend to be people like Tom Cruise and John ­Travolta, and it’s just another way of suggesting — much like the intermittent rumours about their sexual preferences, or the rather contradictory ones that they both have genital areas like those of Action Men after you jemmy off their blue plastic shorts with a screwdriver — that their lives aren’t as glossy and damn well perfect as we all fear they might be. I mean, come on. Tom Cruise? Who doesn’t want to be Tom Cruise? Sure, he’s a bit starey and can’t sustain a relationship, but when those failed relationships are with Nicole Kidman, then Penelope Cruz, then Katie Holmes, then that’s what you might call ‘failing well’.

Ah, Katie Holmes. My age and below, you’d probably watched her as the girl next door on Dawson’s Creek and, probably, fallen in love. It had problems, that show, partly to do with the way they were all 17 and talked like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but mainly because it was all about how awful it was growing up in North Carolina, when it glaringly wasn’t awful because just next door you had Katie Holmes.