Alas poor Buttifant*! The fashion police have busted him.

On Sunday he was a mere coke snorting, tart romping Peer, barely distinguishable from his colleagues – by Monday The Sun had played their master stroke and exposed his red rubber bra with last year’s black leather jacket to the world. What could the man do but resign?

Other Peers get away with being pictured in the moth-eaten winter coat stripped from the corpse of the short tailed weasel, or arriving for dinner dripping with green custard, but a red rubber bra? There is only so much up-with the great British public will put.

The coke snorting is a different matter. Figures published only a few weeks ago, show that London has the highest rate of Cocaine usage in Europe. I am not condoning drug use – but there is no obvious moral reason why we should assume or expect that those who lay down the law on drug use should be any more or less enamoured of its effects. That would be like expecting all NHS workers to be both slim and non-smokers – and they patently aren’t. Do as I say, not as I do, is accepted elsewhere – why not in parliament?

Whoa! I can hear you yelling at the back there. Yes, we do pay them. Yes, that was a tax payer funded five pound note he was snorting up something that looked remarkably like Cocaine. Tax payers fund the cream buns that NHS staff appear to be remarkably fond of too, you know. And the infamous policeman’s donut. So where is the moral difference?

Romping with tarts? Paying for your pleasure? Well, if you bought The Sun this morning, you too are contributing to the tart economy. You didn’t imagine that they gave that story to The Sun for nowt, did you? The Sun bought that story for your pleasure – and undeniably it has given us all pleasure, the frisson of ‘Yeah!’ that we get when the mighty are exposed as horrid little men – oh, wearing his wedding ring too! And he turned the picture of his wife upside down! Tut-curtain-twitching- tut!

It’s the best silly season political story since Stephen Milligan stuffed a satsuma in his mouth. I’ve enjoyed it along with everyone else – but it has made me wonder why?

In this age of Tinder, and sexting, when every drama series contains the obligatory soft porn ‘we’re illustrating real life’ scene, and 13 year olds can have abortions without anyone knowing – why are we so obsessed with demanding that MPs live old fashioned ‘faithful-to-‘er-indoors’ lives? Why is it that you can be an Aberdeen academic and swing from the rafters, (Edinburgh academics are far more discrete) yet get made into a Lord, or marry Royalty, and suddenly the taxpayer pound is cited as a reason why you should adopt a lifestyle the bulk of the population abandoned forty years ago?

As for ‘paying prostitutes’ is disgusting – I have never understood that one. A prostitute is nowt but a time-share wife. Half an hour, for a specific purpose. There is no more shame in paying a prostitute, than there is in being one. Try proposing to your loved one, followed by ‘and of course I will never ever give you money, pay your rent, or buy your clothes’ and count the seconds before you blow dust from your eyes.

Women do trade sex for the ability to further your dynasty, wash your socks, and braise the bison leg you bring home from the forest. Mainly because you men are better suited at hunting down the bison leg in the first place, and we know how high to stoke the fire to serve it at its best. Fair exchange. Christianity has encouraged us to dress that exchange up as ‘love’ aka ‘lust’, and a moral duty to care for the resulting children, but let’s face it, much of modern society is doing little more than trading the bison leg for the leg over. I am not denying that you can feel genuine love (and gratitude) for the hunter who brings home a tender foreleg (or guts the fish. Yuk!) – but to pretend that a relationship is love alone and nothing to do with the provision of edible ungulates is hypocrisy. A hypocrisy oft exposed in the divorce courts.

Which brings me back to Buttifant’s red rubber bra. We (or at least the media) laud Caitlyn Jenner – who has a wife, and children, very much in the public eye – for his/her tentative experiments with female fashion and extreme circumcision, or should that be ‘terminal circumcision with prejudice’? So ‘brave’, so ‘on-trend’ (marvellous for the ratings, says a mischievous voice) and are happy to see him/her on the cover of Vanity Fair.

If Buttifant comes out tomorrow and explains that he is trans-gendering, it was actually his wife’s bra, and it was the stress of ‘listening to allegations of sexual abuse’ that made him act so – will we forgive him?

And can we please go back to hereditary Peers? The inbreeding involved did seem to produce a less obvious crétin.

* I am reliably informed that Lord Sewel’s middle name, Buttifant, is a bastardised version of the French war cry ‘boutez-en-avant’ – ‘kicked out in front’ – and is oft employed by admiring French youths in the wake of a particularly well endowed young lady in her Wonderbra.

An example of parental foresight, or nominative determinism?