No bad sex, please. We’re politicians
‘It’s not actually about sex,” Sir Vince Cable said of his debut thriller, Open Arms, earlier this year, which tells the story of a love affair between a British politician and the heir to an Indian arms manufacturer. “The sex is very discreet – it’s not going to win the Bad Sex Award.”
As it turns out, the Lib Dem leader was right. Although the novel allegedly received so “many” nominations, The Literary Review, which organises the yearly prize, has declared the book inadmissible, “simply because its author is a Member of Parliament”.
Neither my friends in publishing nor the two MPS I checked in with yesterday had the faintest idea that this rule existed – or why.
“I can only guess that anything involving sex and politics is now so firmly off limits, it can’t even be jeered at,” suggested one.
Which would be a shame (how on earth will we all fill our time…?), but surely not as great a shame as the one tweeted last night by a despondent Lib Dem – that, these days, “we can’t even win an award for being bad”.