And I thought the mental image of (the late) gnome-like Robin Cook with his (then) secretary was bad enough, or gravestone-toothed David Mellor with that horse-faced model woman in his Chelsea strip. But oh no – Labour can always go one better… I mean, PRESCOTT of all people? The standards of 40-something secretaries really have slipped, haven’t they? AND he didn’t even have the decency to do it in the back of one of his two jags, but his Whitehall flat. (That’s the one paid for by the taxpayers, rather than the one he failed to pay Council tax on…)

Update: It’s just sunk in how utterly screwed the government should be over all this. I mean, in just the last week we’ve had:

the ongoing loans for peerages/contracts crisis
flogging Eurofighter jets to the human rights-light Saudi regime
cock-ups over calculating NHS debt
£7,000 spent on the PM’s wife’s hair
threats of NHS strikes
revelations that new troops deployed to Afghanistan will have insufficient air support
revelations that a bunch of people who should have been deported haven’t been
the resignation of the Chief Executive of the NHS / Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health
the Health Secretary under pressure to resign
the Home Secretary under pressure to resign
yet ANOTHER overpayment of tax credits, threatening to destroy yet more hard-up families as they are forced to repay them
the Deputy Prime Minister having an affair

And God alone knows what else I’ve missed. Do they actually WANT to get wiped out at the local elections next week?