Only partners are due some answers (though they often don’t want them) and only they should be able to sack you. It is also worth remembering that many celebs lie about an affair not so much to save their skin, but to save their betrayed spouse from the further horror of public humiliation.Surely it’s time to release sex from the shackles of honesty and return it to its proper sphere – blissful and endless speculation.. I like talking about sex as much as the next person – more than the next person, in all probability – but there’s a difference between veiled frames of reference and incontinent self-confession.In the natural order of things, sex is a mysterious and private pursuit. There is no obligation to confess your most intimate encounters to the outside world, and prurient employers and journalists should not have the temerity to quiz you on them. Remember when Chris Evans claimed to be dating Geri Halliwell, or, more recently, Jordan’s avowed passion for Peter Thingie from the jungle? Both relationships had the PR’s ring of solid tin about them. Few confessions in recent times have been as suspect as Leslie Ash’s and Lee Chapman’s insistence that her hospitalisation was due to a particularly vigorous bout of lovemaking.And even were it true, saying such things in public is so flesh-crawlingly creepy that you feel the need for stringent legislation to make such declarations offences against public decency. They are equally splenetic about Jemima Khan’s and Hugh Grant’s refusal to clarify their “friendship”.

This demand for carnal honesty is peculiar, not least for the fact that, when it comes to sex, denials are more eloquent than affirmations. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” roughly translates as “She gave me the best blowjob in history”. Clinton was merely following the social convention; in Edith Wharton’s day they would have understood the subtext perfectly.Frankly, there are few things more suspicious than celebrity avowals of fervid congress. If people didn’t routinely lie about sex, we wouldn’t have all those spurious statistics (a tautology, if ever I wrote one) whereby men claim to have had 25 partners by the time they’re 30, while women have bedded only two, including their husband.

The Mail complained that animal rights activists “threaten Britain’s world-beating, multibillion-pound pharmaceutical industry”. The Daily Telegraph was furious about the £1bn a year investment “lost to Britain” through the actions of people who oppose animal experimentation. The Times fretted that a more forceful regulatory regime to protect laboratory animals would risk “scaring off the very knowledge-based employers on which the economy depends”.Not so moral, is it? It’s one thing to infect live animals with a nasty virus in the hope of developing a vaccine to protect humans and another to do it in the hope that the big drug companies will make even more money and create more jobs. Certain sections of the media are howling in rage at the possibility that Sven Goran Eriksson denied bedding a comely secretary. You can only presume that there are a couple of generous-spirited souls out there who make Annabel Chong look like a rank amateur Unless people are more like my circle of acquaintance.

In which case women tend to cull unappetising specimens from their memory banks while men exaggerate every drunken cuddle until in their own minds they’ve bedded six supermodels and the woman from accounts who bears a passing resemblance to Felicity Kendal. The only things we truly know about sex is that our parents did it at least once and so, less appetisingly, did that couple from Big Brother.Considering Joe Public’s talent for sexual mendacity, it’s amazing that we seem to think celebrities are duty bound to tell us every last secret of the bed chamber. The fibs they tell about size, frequency, habit and partners tumble so thick and fast and fluently from the human mouth, it’s hard to believe we’re not wired for sexual dishonesty. A recent survey tells us that Britons aged 50-plus are having the best sex of their lives. Are they, by gum! Not just good, but the very best? Better than when the first great, three-times-a-night passion of their lives set their bodies aflame and they suddenly realised why they’d been put on the planet?
Better than when the men folk didn’t need Viagra and nobody’s back made that strange cracking sound? Obviously that’s far more plausible than the possibility that they bragged a little to a market researcher who had the impertinence to call just as they were snuggling up on the sofa with a flatulent cocker spaniel to watch Richard and Judy. It is the same with choice in 21st-century capitalism, over which Mr Howard and Mr Blair have recently been squabbling like …