Search

It’s been a bonanza month for sleazewatchers both sides of the Atlantic. First Eliot Spitzer’s expensive romps with former Girl Gone Wild Ashley Dupree were revealed, then the nauseating instances of Nick Clegg’s priapic past, and then finally the hideous video of Max Mosley’s bilingual orgies. Achtung!

And as if all this wasn’t enough, the British public was forced this week to confront the concept of Ken Livingstone as an uber-fertile lothario, wantonly croaking his way around the women of West Hampstead.

Red Ken, Leninspark himself, has apparently fathered five children by three women. And best of all, two of these were by different mothers, within weeks of each other in the early 90s when Ken was actually in a long-term relationship with somebody completely different.

Do socialists not believe in birth control? This wasn’t the 60s! Marie Stopes had long ago dismissed myths about doing it standing up and pulling out in time. And three women at the same time? Who does he think he is, Jeffrey Archer?

Of course, this being Ken, he completely refuses to accept that these revelations might damage his infallible reputation.

This is the same man who doggedly refused to apologise for likening a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard.

Then he talked about his desire to see the Saudi Royal family “swinging from lampposts.” And went into business with Hugo Chavez.

It’s fair to say that self-criticism doesn’t play a large part in his daily agenda.

Who in their right mind would have a child with Ken Livingstone? He’s grumpy, he’s belligerent, he’s always getting in drunken fights with strangers, and he never apologises.

Then there are the newts. And the fact that you’ll forever be forced to lug your pushchair onto the bendy bus because cars are so verboten. It’s amazing that he’s managed to find one host womb for his manly seed, let alone three.

If, like me, you’re vomiting a little at the thought of Ken’s “seed,” bear a thought for his long-suffering partner, Emma Beal.

At her sister’s birthday party in 2002, Ken drunkenly pushed her friend down a stairwell. Then he “manhandled” Beal (who was pregnant at the time) before dashing off before the police arrived. A drunken, pugnacious, newt-loving communist. What’s not to love?

So what did Ken himself have to say about the emergent news of his “unusual” family? Needless to say, he blamed the media.

“Voters are not interested with whom I slept 30 years ago,” said Ken. Damn straight. It’s 15 years ago that we’re wondering about, when you seemed to have decided difficulty keeping it in your pants.

“The problem is that the media in this country is incapable of having a reasonable debate about the private lives of politicians, the pleasures and the pains,” Ken concluded.

 We’ll take a “reasonable” debate, if you’re offering. Doesn’t the public have a right to know about the predilections of their elected officials? Ken can tell us about the “pleasures” of his private life, and in lieu of any recent Tory sleaze, Max Mosley can tell us about the pains.