Diary – 25 July 2019

So the party of family values has chosen as leader a man of whom to say he has the morals of an alley cat would be to libel the feline species. Thus the Tories, with two women PMs to their credit, have achieved another historic first: scuppering the belief — argued by the Daily Mail in my 26 years as editor — that politicians with scandalous private lives cannot hold high office. I make no comment on this, or about the 31-year-old minx who is the current Boris Johnson bedwarmer, but ask you instead to spare a thought for Petronella’s abortion, Helen’s love child, Marina’s humiliation and her four children’s agony. On which note, a confession: I myself have had several emotional dalliances with our hero, including a lachrymose lunch (his tears not mine) with Boris bewailing that the Mail was destroying his marriage, while confiding that, anyway, monogamy is just a bourgeois convention.