A rose among the ‘wilting f lowers’

ROGER GALE MP has laid into ‘female journalists’ for outing lechers in Parliament in an unwarranted ‘witch-hunt’. Last week, however, the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown revealed that a Cabinet Minister in the Thatcher Government had once summoned her to his Westminster office.

There he invited her to become his mistress in return for a flat in Mayfair. YBA turned him down like a bedspread, but not just because the Tory had made her an indecent proposal, or because she is what Gale would call a ‘wilting flower’. ‘There were photos of his family as well as Mrs T all over the place,’ she explained. ‘He had a wife and children.’ She continues to refuse to name him. There is some honour and decency among female hacks, Roger, but it takes a gentleman to acknowledge it.