Skipper

Perhaps it's a sign of the trivial times in which we live that the Sun ran a story during the election that Tony Blair and Cherie had told a reporter that Tony sometimes did it 'five times a night' with him adding 'more if I feel like it.' Private Eye followed up by claiming the Sun also said the PM had a 'big willy'. In today's Observer, John Humphrys is alleged to have told Blair-as they both lined up at a BBC toilet- ' from what I read in the Sun,I'm surprised you can stand so close to the unrinal.' My knowledge of British politics, I fear, does not run to 'knob stories' about Prime Ministers, though it is suggested by some that Gladstone, sublimated some of his remarkably high sex drive into saving fallen women from London's mean streets.

Does it matter? About as much, I'd say, as the story about William Hague drinking fourteen pints a day when a whippersnapper assistant on a beer lorry. It might be part of a New Labour strategy to add a new dimension to their man's appeal but more likely, it was a jokey interview with which the Blair's went along but which the po- faced broadsheets chose to take seriously.