Now we know: discrimination against exhibitionists is politically incorrect

Writing from the Commons for the Daily Telegraph this week, though alluding to him, I went to tortuous lengths not to name the MP whom a Sunday newspaper had exposed as the subject of the latest ‘gay sex scandal’. Why should I have mentioned him in the first place? Because only the day after the Mail on Sunday had made him famous, he strolled into a committee’s proceedings as if nothing untoward had happened to him.

In my line of work, it was therefore impossible not to mention him. He did not say a word, but his presence distracted all of us. We were at the standing committee on the inter-governmental conference on the European Union’s proposed constitution. The Foreign Secretary Mr Jack Straw tried to win back our attention by mentioning, at the top of page 108 of a certain unread document, ‘article 3210’. But the only article we were thinking of was in the Mail on Sunday.