How journalism works part...oh, a million.

Black Dog in the Mail on Sunday ran a piece today which is another snippet of how jouralism works.

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who is trying to oust Speaker John Bercow in Buckingham, recalls a drunken night with a Latvian beauty called Liga in his memoirs.
‘I met her in a pub and accepted her invitation home for a drink. She was sleek and seductive and I will not splutter that after the first bottle I would necessarily have behaved like Sir Galahad.’
Farage is lucky his second wife, Kirsten, is so understanding.

What the Mail on Sunday fail to add, rather like the eminently punchable Camilla Long, she of the 'cancer is hilarious' remark, is that he actually denied having an affair with her and explained his reasons why.

Nick Clegg might boast about having slept with 30 people (wow, you go for it, lad) and now we have the possibility of imagining Cameron giving horse faced wifey one now she's announced she's knocked up (what convenient timing, why even bother announcing the manifesto?) but some of them actually admit that they can't do it at certain times, and it's all the more amusing.

From the book (which I am reading and then hurling through the window of an office in East London)

She claimed that I was a beast in bed and 'we must have had sex about seven times'. Given the amount that I had drunk on the night in question the former statement was probably accurate - or would have been had I even got to a bed. The second was a physical impossibility...

There are, however, various merits to excess. On that night it saved me. I fell asleep on her sofa where, by her no doubt truthful account, I 'snored like a horse'.

But of course, as any nineteenth-century maiden could have told me, protestations of innocence will avail you nothing if you have spent the night with another. The alter or the scandals sheets await you. Liga wasn't screwed. I was.

But then one shouldn't expect accuracy from the Mail on Sunday. The story before that one, which Black Dog hasn't mentioned, is all about their double page spread, for which the tales are said in UKIP circles to have come from Richard North, one of the authors of EU Referendum.

Farage's response to those? 'I only wish they were all true'. Still, if you want your Tory chums to get in despite not really having a clue what their policies are, who are editors to let the truth get in the way of a good story?

I don't know what North is like at drinking but I tend not to listen to the words of disgruntled ex employees. Which is why, of course, the junius and other assorted blogs by fools like Gary Cartwright (who, despite being married, groped my friend and ignored her objections) and Greg Lance-Watkins and his 27 blogs of bullshit.

Go buy the book, it's very interesting. And this coming from someone who tends to find biographies only useful for propping doors open with.