Never have cheating spouses been more in need of the Society for the Protection of Adulterers!

MY FAVOURITE journalist, Auberon Waugh, was not just one of the sharpest, funniest and most original commentators ever to grace the pages of this or any other newspaper. He also went to his grave in 2001 as the self-appointed president, chairman — and, indeed, the only known member — of Vespa, the Venerable Society for the Protection of Adulterers.

Never have errant husbands been more in need of his organisation than today.

Such was the thought that occurred to me when I finished laughing at yesterday’s story of the former soldier who dialled 999 after he found a black box fitted with batteries hidden in his car, telling the operator it looked like a ‘viable device’.

West Yorkshire police swung into action, cordoning off the vehicle and calling in the bomb squad, while Leeds City Council’s emergency planning team prepared to evacuate neighbours and place nearby schools on lock-down.

It was only after about an hour that the ex-soldier’s estranged wife came forward and sheepishly admitted that the suspicious package was, in fact, a GPS tracking device, which she had planted in his car because she believed he was seeing another woman.

All right, it can’t have been very funny while the panic lasted. But no great harm was done and no offence was committed. As a police source said: ‘Suspicious wives are perfectly entitled to bug their husbands if they so wish.’

Forbidden

But what would Waugh’s Vespa have made of it? I found the story fascinating because it highlights one of the huge number of social consequences of the technological revolution, which its progenitors can barely have imagined when they had their eureka moments.

During most of the time when Waugh was writing, after all, adulterous husbands could avoid exposure if they were careful to obey a few basic rules: don’t go home smeared in the other woman’s lipstick or reeking of her perfume; don’t leave incriminating evidence in pockets — receipts for hotel rooms or candlelit dinners — for the wife to find when she’s off to the dry- cleaners; don’t develop a tendresse for a kiss-and-tell blabbermouth like Edwina Currie . . . etc, etc.

But these days, technology has supplied suspicious wives (and husbands, for that matter) with a huge range of electronic aids to detecting their other halves’ infidelities.

I’m not just thinking of GPS — although my techno-savvy friends tell me this has now become so sophisticated that the exsoldier’s wife needn’t have gone to all the trouble of hiding a bomb-like object in her husband’s car.

She could just have activated the GPS on his mobile phone and downloaded an app that would have shown her all his movements while he kept it switched on.

True, I’ve heard it argued that mobiles facilitate forbidden liaisons, since they make it so easy to arrange trysts.

But there are many other ways, surely, in which they may expose a guilty secret. I’ll never forget the opening pages of Tom Wolfe’s brilliant The Bonfire Of The Vanities (set in pre-mobile days), in which the antihero Sherman McCoy sneaks off in the rain to ring his mistress from a call-box, telling his wife that he’s taking the dog for a walk.

When he reaches the phone, the dog’s lead gets tangled round his legs and in his rain-soaked confusion he absent-mindedly dials his home number, putting his wife on red alert.

If that could happen in the days when we had to dial seven or eight separate digits to make a connection, how much easier it must be now to send a self-incriminating text to a spouse, with one misdirected tap on a touch-screen.

Suspicious wife, shouting upstairs from the kitchen: ‘Darling, why have you just sent me a text from the bathroom, calling me Kittikins and asking if I’m free to meet up after work? You’ve never called me Kittikins before.’

Then there’s plastic money, with every transaction electronically recorded to catch out the unwary.

Suspicious wife: ‘Darling, I thought you told me you went to Newcastle last weekend for a sales convention?’

Guilty husband: ‘Yes, my love. As I told you, it was a most frightful bore.’

Passionate

Furious wife: ‘Can you explain, then, why our electronic bank statement says you spent £130.63 at the Fifi-A-Go-Go brasserie and bar in Brighton on Saturday night, and another £80 at the Channel View Hotel on Sunday morning?’

Meanwhile, how are today’s love-cheats to explain away strange addresses programmed into the family car’s satnav — or selfies, rashly posted on the internet, showing them locked in passionate embrace with a floozie or gigolo?

Never in our history, surely, has playing away from home been a higher-risk enterprise. It’s a wonder that anyone dares.

But, of course, it’s not just would-be adulterers whose lives have been changed by the electronic revolution, in ways that may not have occurred to Sir Tim BernersLee & Co when they came up with their brilliant inventions. Yes, some of the consequences were predictable from the start.

I’m thinking of the slow death of the High Street, brought about by the arrival of online shopping — and, indeed, the struggle of my own trade of print journalism to adapt to the challenge of competition from the internet.

Allow me to pause, here, for a sideswipe at Lord Justice Leveson and his colleagues on the Bench, who have exacerbated the problems of the Press by concentrating all their regulatory fire on us, while turning a blind eye to the sins of our far less responsible competitors in cyberspace.

Could Sir Tim ever have guessed that one effect of his World Wide Web would be that most of the globe’s population would know the identity of a celebrity who takes out an injunction, while the British Press alone would be banned from publishing it?

We could add other trades, too, to the list of those threatened by the relentless march of electronic science. When those wizards came up with satnav, for instance, I wonder if it crossed their minds that they were signing the death warrant of London’s black cab trade, by making all those years that drivers had spent learning the Knowledge almost pointless overnight?

Sharp

As for other social consequences, yes, the pioneers of the internet could probably foresee that millions of men who would never have dared ask a shopkeeper for a dirty magazine would drool over images of naked women on their computers.

But could they have imagined, in their wildest nightmares, this week’s finding that a whole generation’s attitude to sex would be warped by internet porn?

Shockingly, a survey commissioned by the NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner for England finds that 94 per cent of 14-yearolds have viewed hard-core material, while more than half of 11 to 16-year-old boys believe on-screen porn is ‘realistic’.

If the report’s fears prove well founded, this means young teenagers are growing up believing it’s natural and acceptable to degrade women and physically abuse them.

Yet paradoxically, electronic gadgetry is also said to have had one intriguing social consequence that surely nobody could have foreseen: the staggeringly sharp drop in teenage pregnancies — at a record low, after falling 51 per cent in England and Wales over just 16 years.

Naturally, politicians are quick to claim this remarkable turnaround is due to the teenage pregnancy strategy introduced by the last Labour government. But having seen the way teenagers operate, I’m more inclined to believe the alternative theory.

If this is correct, the reason that so few under-18s are getting pregnant is that most teenagers spend their lives conducting ‘virtual’ love affairs over their mobile phones, sending each other photographs of their private parts but seldom making physical contact.

All I can say with certainty is that we’ve hardly begun to comprehend the hundreds of ways in which science is changing human behaviour.

If only Bron Waugh were still with us, he might offer sage guidance on how to cope. As it is, the only advice I can offer those tempted to stray is that it’s probably safest and best to resist. Otherwise, it might be a real bomb next time.