London - When Sally Bercow is in a hole, she knows just what to do: she keeps right on digging. Before she began her ill-advised sojourn in the Celebrity Big Brother house, she let it be known how she had persuaded her husband John (British parliamentary speaker) to go along with the plan.
“Feminine wiles,” she smirked, meaning what you and I might call a dirty weekend. “He eventually gave in.”
It was a lewd confession that mocked her husband, implied his weakness and earned her neither friendly headlines nor public support.
When Big Brother viewers retaliated by giving her the boot, she emerged to announce that she would earn John’s forgiveness. How, precisely?
“I should take him on a dirty weekend after this.’
So, not once, but twice in a single week, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons paraded eye-wateringly intimate details of her married life in public.
“Eeeeuw!” comes the shriek of teenagers, faced with the thought of anybody over 40 actually doing it. “TMI!”
And I have to admit, they are right. Not only do I think it’s Too Much Information, I also think there are far too many women handing it out these days.
Perhaps one of the most memorable examples is Cherie Blair, who regaled us with wretched tales about her absent “contraceptive equipment” on a visit to Balmoral. (Cherie, honey, we already guessed you’d had sex when you became pregnant; it was the where, when and how that was surplus to requirements, even if it did involve a royal palace.)
Then there’s Dame Helen Mirren, who rarely thinks to spare our blushes when it comes to her bedroom antics. She once told an interviewer that she insists on setting her alarm clock early so that she can start every day with a sexual workout.
Joan Collins has just weighed in with a book that stresses the importance of regular sex for her beauty routine. At the age of 78, she proudly informed the world, she and her husband Percy “ a mere 32 years her junior “ still enjoy a “very good time in the boudoir”.
Actress Lynda Bellingham is another culprit. She recently recalled a one-night stand that was just getting under way when her pick-up said: “I can’t believe I’m going to **** the OXO mum.” Admittedly, she told the story with remorse, but why mention it in the first place?
And I absolutely loathe how Denise Welch’s “confidences” routinely reduce her husband Tim Healey - one of Britain’s best-loved and most able actors - to a comic role in a bawdy B-movie.
“Tim has this thing he does when he wants jiggy-jigs [here, she helpfully performed a mime] though luckily, as he gets older, his sex drive isn’t that high. There was a time when I literally couldn’t bend to put dishes in the dishwasher.” Cue gales of knowing laughter.
And what about the highfaluting Trudie Styler? Despite her pretensions to grandeur, she never seems to shut up about her “private” life. Even though her adult children admit to embarrassment, we are relentlessly treated to reminders of how she and Sting enjoy tantric sex, swingers’ parties and strip clubs.
Jane Fonda is no better. She has stepped forward with a new book to blow away what she perceives to be the cobwebs of secrecy surrounding older women’s sex lives. For instance (and forgive me in advance for this one): “If you have been celibate for a long time, your vagina is likely to need some attention.”
Enough! Cease! Desist! Please!
Look, Miss Fonda, just for starters: women who came of age in the Sixties and Seventies are the last people who need your handy tips.
We didn’t exactly invent sex, but there was enough of it about that we grew up with unprecedented information, discussion and, yes, practice. We certainly don’t need viragos like you to bang on about our right to have sex. In fact, it would be more helpful if you spoke of our equal right not to have sex - but that would get in the way of showing off about your fabulously high libido, wouldn’t it?
We don’t need you to speak openly and candidly, as if to free us from our prim, blushing, tongue-tied silence. If my circle is anything to go by, we’re not prim, we never blush and, as for silence, well, you might be the ones blushing if you could hear some of our down-and-dirty, woman-to-woman chats.
But you won’t hear them because they’re private. Stories to share with fondness and friendship. Not in a tawdry and brash manner to disconcert total strangers.
Women who lay bare their rumpy-pumpy probably think they sound modern, progressive, liberated. I think they sound boastful, desperate, pathetic. In fact, much like men of old who used to boast of stamina, prowess and notches on bedposts - until we women persuaded them it was downright humiliating.
If men still do that kind of bragging - and I expect they do - they save it for when they are with other men. Boys’ stuff. Private. So much nicer.
Any man who publicly proclaimed himself a stud muffin these days would be howled out of town. How daft, then, for women not to have learned from the lessons we taught men.
I know we live in a publicity-crazed age where personal information is priceless. But that makes it all the more important to know where the boundaries lie between public and private, between someone else’s right to know and your right to some old-fashioned decorum.
As it happens, I saw some of the latter in action only last week at, of all unlikely places, the Edinburgh Festival, where Neil and Christine Hamilton were hosting a boisterous live chat show.
Now, the Hamiltons have never been “ how shall we put this? “ backwards in coming forward when it involves adding to the nation’s gaiety. Spankily dressed, glugging back fizz on stage, flashing up pictures of Neil in stockings, you’d have thought that anything goes with them.
And so it did until one guest, perhaps fuelled by the fizz, cheekily asked them a question of an intimate nature.
Christine’s genial smile tightened slightly. “Neil and I,” she said coolly, “never talk about our sex life.” And on with the show: grace, charm and dignity intact.
Christine may no longer be an MP’s wife, but - despite all her shenanigans over the years - she could teach a lot to Sally Bercow, who, for the moment at least, still is. - Daily Mail