The affairs which have nothing to do with the heart

LET’S face it: no one comes out of the Ashley Madison affair looking good. Ashley Madison is a website where people sign up to cheat on their partners. The people who run it had a shoddy data retention policy, not to mention a leaky security system.

And now the site has been hacked by a vigilante collective calling itself the Impact Team, who are blackmailing Ashley Madison and its clients by threatening to release customer r ecords unless t he website is shut down.

This is hardball stuff for a site with a girly name that sounds like it should be releasing autotuned girlpower hits and going on dates with members of One Direction rather than rupturing our cringe muscles with its whynothaveanaffair.com.

Ironically, Ashley Madison had been marketing itself as a safe choice for nervous adulterers, especially during an economic crisis.

Don’t have an affair at the office, urges the site, because they can result in public meltdowns and one of you could lose your job. Don’t go to a singles dating service; trying to blindside someone about your status cannot end well.

THIRTY four million people have signed up to the website. Even allowing that a percentage could be undercover journalists working on a story about Ashley Madison, that’s a lot of online philandering, at least until this week. Many of them were drawn in by the promise of privacy, but I suspect a fair few j oined because they have the seduction skills of a turnip.

I have no moral high ground to stand on here: I don’t like affairs, but my objection isn’t so much moral, it’s just that they simply sound like they require a lot of organisation.

Affairs are for the kind of people who have their passport and driving licence numbers memorised.

Also, I’m mean. Never mind the price of trust, what about the cost of secure credit cards, hotel rooms and secret phones? And do I lose loyalty points on these illicit second accounts?

However, there are other people who want affairs in the same way that your dog wants the contents of your fr i dge: desperately, but without much of a clue as how to go about it. We’ve all met them; it l ooks like s ome of us even married them.

I used to work in an office where one chap was notorious for sidling up to female colleagues and murmuring: ‘Would you be interested in having an affair with me?’

It was hard to generate much outrage, since the offer only came around once per person, a bit like independence referendums in the old days.

He was also easy to bat away; the kinder ones briskly redirected him (‘No time for an affair, Jason, but I would say yes to a coffee if you’re making one’).

Others gave him a blunt monstering (‘I prefer to date within my own species’).

He was regarded as an in-house irritation, like the office sniffer, the office foghorn and the person who liked to talk about football clubs as if they were close relatives.

Ashley Madison seems ideal for someone like him; those who yearn for a clandestine bunk- up, yet exude the in-person romantic allure of Lord Sewel.

Still, I think even Jason would draw the line at striding through the door crying: ‘Who wants to see my Ashley Madison loyalty card? I get upgrades on the hotel rooms if I collect points.’