Politics: January 2006 Archives

Ever since the News of the World broke the story at the weekend that Mark Oaten, former Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman, enjoyed the company of young male prostitutes, I have been mulling over the phrase "humiliate him with a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe".

I have today been passed information from my man in Westminster that would indicate that Mr Oaten's preferred way of being humiliated was to have rent-boys defecate on his chest or to urinate on him, whilst he proceeded with getting his rocks off.

Whether this is in fact what happened I doubt we'll ever find out, but it certainly ranks up there in the too revolting to describe (except on seedy second rate websites) category.

What is interesting is that rumours have also been surfacing recently about fellow Lib Dem MP and total heterosexual [1], Simon Hughes, who was alleged to have paid a prostitute to deposit little brown fishies in her knickers, which he then carried round in his briefcase. This sounds too bizarre to be true, but then we all know the fate of Stephen Milligan MP, who died in February 1994 after a bizarre sex act that went horribly wrong. He of course died of asphyxiation after strangling himself with an electric flex, whislt wearing stocking, suspenders and a black bin-liner over his head, complete with an orange in his mouth. A tragic case of auto-erotic sex gone horribly wrong.

Anyway, back to the point, it looks like that only leaves Menzies Campbell in the running, unless you count that new boy that no one knows the name of. You too will be able to order your commemorative "Ming Vases" from the Franklin Mint shortly after his coronation as Lib Dem leader.

[1] Simon Hughes of course hired black teenage male research assistants purely for assisting him with the process of dealing with parliamentary work, and any insinuation of sexual activity between them is absolutely false.

[ Hot off the press - our London correspondent has just filed this report with me ]

The hyperbole predictably spewed forth by the official media in Kuwait about the death of their head of State, Emir Jaber AlAhmed AlSabah, was correct in one aspect: his was a crucial reign, spanning a period of time during which Kuwait and its environs underwent drastic and tumultuous changes.

Kuwait has an almost unique position in the modern Arab world in that the country has a constitution that was written in good faith. Apart from Lebanon no other modern Arab state has a proper constitution. And, far better than Lebanon’s, the Kuwaiti constitution is a genuine national political document, whereas Lebanese democracy was never little more thinly-veiled sectarianism. Although Kuwait never enjoyed the personal and political freedoms Lebanon had prior to its all too predictable civil war, Kuwait did possess a sounder political infrastructure enshrined in its constitution.

The problem was that pre-independence, pre-1961 Kuwait was a medieval social and political entity with the ruling family in particular, the AlSabah, retaining a medieval view of themselves, their place in society and, indeed, their right to rule. This was in direct contradiction to the constitution that clearly established their role within a legal, rather than tribal, framework. If the foresight of the formers of this constitution, which included the then Emir Abdullah AlSalem, was that the ruling family would evolve and modernise, history has proven them badly mistaken, and that mistake was finally paid for in the reign of Jaber AlAhmed.