Sexual Politics

So LibDem leader Nick Clegg has told a magazine that he may have had sex with up to 30 people in his life. The cheap joke is that, unusually for a leading LibDem, so far as we know they were all women. But this blog doesn't do cheap jokes.
But it's the cue for the tabloids to describe him as a Lothario, a Casanova, if not a priapic, sex-crazed satyr, from whom no woman is safe.

It's impossible to know whether this was misguided honesty on Clegg's part in a situation where he would have been justified in telling the interviewer to mind his own fucking business or whether it was calculated to increase his electoral appeal.
You may recall that William Hague once claimed to have drunk 12 pints of beer a day when he was a teenager, which was greeted with some scepticism.
Then there was Cherie Blair telling The Sun that Tony was a three-times-a-night man. This also strained credulity (and for Tony might have strained something else) if only because, as the comedian Al Murray put it, any man seeing that large clown's face coming towards him would claim to have a heart condition.

Returning to Clegg, is up to 30 sexual partners for a man in his forties really evidence of rampant promiscuity?
It's surely a bit like the definitions of 'left' and 'right' in politics. It depends where you're coming from.
Some people clock up 30 partners a year, some in just a month and some only in an entire lifetime. The married, ultra-monogamous person might clock up only one. For a small minority the tally is 'none'.

Would the interviewer (Piers Morgan) have asked the same question of an older politician such as Vince Cable? Or of a female politician? What brave man would have asked the question of Margaret Thatcher?
(Interesting side-note: it was during Thatcher's premiership that (a) explicit sexual information was promulgated because of the AIDS scare and (b) hard-core pornography was legalised for the first time. Pity the poor ministers who had to brief her on those two issues whilst marvelling that old iron drawers gave her approval).

All of which reminds me of the two old Chelsea Pensioners discussing when they last had sex.
"Not since my wife died ten years ago", said one. "What about you?"
"Not since 1918."
"Really! As long ago as that?"
(Looks at watch) "Well, it's only 19.45 now."