What a spankingly splendid scandal

Apparently, according to a variety of relatively reliable sources that include the man himself, the Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, is in the habit of accepting money from a paparazzi agency in exchange for advising them how they might best snap pap pictures of the Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk.

Is this not one of the most amazing facts you have ever learned? Every bit of it — that tabloids want these photographs; that photo-graphers will pay for them; that an MP can earn a tidy sum by secretly facilitating them — simply boggles me. Are they all at it? Maybe that’s why we keep seeing those vile pictures of David Cameron fatly jogging, or Jeremy Corbyn dressed like Tony Soprano taking the bins out. You never know.

Back to Danczuk, though, for he has had quite a fortnight. On New Year’s Eve it was revealed that he had been sending explicit text messages to a 17-year-old girl who had applied to him for work experience. Whether she truly wanted work experience with a Labour MP is a moot point, not least because it later emerged in the Sunday People that she runs a dominatrix fetish website via which she sells used underpants and toenail clippings, and such things normally only run concurrent with political aspirations in the Young Conservatives. Still, she got flirty, and he offered to spank her, and she went to the Sun.

That’s not all. Danczuk’s girlfriend, a Labour councillor, had already dumped him, partly (she told the newspapers) because he’d been messaging other people, but also because he’d kissed somebody else. Although so had she, and that somebody (in her case) was Danczuk’s second ex-wife, Karen, also a Labour councillor, whose breasts you may remember being in a lot of newspapers because she kept taking photographs of them.