Rooney apologises

Well OK, Wayne Rooney may have gone too far by bringing escorts back to his house while his pregnant wife was away.

In general though, every time a sportsman, politician, actor or anyone else in the public eye is caught paying for sexual services there is an outcry because he (usually it's a man) has broken the arbitrary no-sex rule that our uptight society imposes. He then apologises publicly, like a political prisoner in a Stalinist show trial, and people who know nothing about the subject express their outrage and sadness that this goes on at all. Olivia Cole in the London Evening Standard wrote:

Any city's red light district is a grim and frightening spectacle. But here in London, some of the city's best restaurants and nightclubs are full of what people euphemistically term young girls and their uncles.

It's only in Hollywood that the uncles tend to look and act like Richard Gere. Or that hookers have as fabulous a time as Truman Capote's Holly Golightly. If you want to be put off your food, go and have dinner at ... well, a number of big-name West End restaurants and clubs. The idea of the good-time girl paid to have a good time alters when you take a hard look at very old, very fat men entertaining swarms of breakable Eastern European teenagers. They look less like Julia Roberts or Audrey Hepburn than small, broken birds with dead eyes.

Of course. As an Evening Standard op-ed writer, Olivia Cole must have often found herself being put off her dinner in West End restaurants by the presence of old, fat men exploiting numerous dead-eyed Eastern European teenagers. I mean, who hasn't? I can't say I have, to be honest, but perhaps I lack Cole's journalistic observational skills. Notice that the men's age is a factor in putting Cole off her West End dinners. Also notice that she mentions grim and frightening red light districts for no other reason than to set the scene for the disgusting spectacle of older men buying dinners for young women. I have no doubt that red light districts are often grim and dangerous, although I've never seen one and don't particularly want to. None of this has anything whatever to do with any celebrity hooker scandal.

What would happen, I wonder, if just for once the celebrity in question - or even his wronged partner - could stand up and say, "It's only sex, for heaven's sake. You should try it."