THAT Clegg interview

You can always rely on Piers Morgan to lower the tone of anything he takes part in, so it's no surprise that he subjected Nick Clegg to what I can imagine was for Nick a quite uncomfortable personal grilling. In an interview for GQ magazine, reported by the BBC, he answered some pretty intimate personal questions in his usual straightforward and honest manner.

I see that I was not alone in wondering if the reports of this interview were not an April fool. Christine suggests that some things are better left unsaid, but I think he did the best he could with such a cheeky line of questioning. He had 2 options - refusing to answer, which would have come across as prudish and po faced or making the best job he could of it. I think that he comes across as a likeable human being and escaped with his dignity intact. He wasn't crude or disrespectful to anyone.

I can't help wondering, though, what would people be saying if a female politican made the same comments. I suspect that the Fleet Street columnists would have a field day, calling her all sorts of names. There's still an expectation, even now, that women should have a relatively small number of sexual partners and should never, ever talk about them.