Charles on… anything that comes along

Latest victim surely of what we can be pleased to call Spectatorgate is Simon Hoggart, who this weekend was forced to admit that he, too, had a sexual relationship with Kimberly Quinn/Fortier. Good grief, is there anyone on or around the Spectator who wasn’t up to some sort of illicit bonking? Boris Johnson, Rod Liddle, Petronella Wyatt, Simon Hoggart… It’s like Tory ministers in the 1990s.

It’s going to be extremely hard for Hoggart now. As he’s Parliamentary sketch writer on The Guardian and host of “The News Quiz” on Radio 4, how can anything he writes not be ever so slightly (or even a bit more than slightly) tainted by “Is this because you know in the Biblical sense..?”; and as for his next appearance on the quiz show.. It’s like Angus Deayton on “Have I Got News For You”, who was fatally wounded by becoming news. I wonder if Hoggart will just quietly let someone else front it.

And I certainly wouldn’t want to be in his shoes in the inevitable meeting with Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor, probably on Monday. That’s quite apart from the jolly Sunday he’ll have spent talking to his wife.

Truly, this affair is incredible, in that you wouldn’t believe it as fiction. And I’d really have to look a long way to find someone who now has any respect for Ms Quinn - noting that Hoggart says the sexual relationship carried on after her marriage in 2001. And then she took up with David Blunkett…

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