Mr. Elder's reference to Peter Mandelson's "accidental outing" by Jeremy Paxman is interesting. A short time ago, my mother phoned me to ask if I had seen Newsnight the previous evening. I had not. "Didn't you see what he did to wee Charlie?" Now Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, isn't exactly "wee", at least not horizontally, but my mother - a lifelong Tory activist - was outraged that Paxman had insulted wee Charlie by publicly suggesting that he drank too much whisky. And this a few days before his wedding. "I'll never trust that Paxman again," she said.
There again, perhaps Paxman and Kennedy were acting in collusion in a cunning plot to attract Tory ladies to the Lib Dems.