Quotes of the Day

No sex please, we're british, is a charming idea — and an obsolete one. Britain now has the highest teen birth rate in Western Europe. Its TV and tabloids overflow with unclad women and randy tales. And if recent events are any guide, some of its better political magazines do, too. There certainly seems to be strong stuff in the water cooler at the offices of the Spectator, London's venerable weekly journal of conservative thought and culture.

Over the summer the magazine's assistant editor, Rod Liddle, was savaged for weeks in multiple newspapers by his estranged wife, Rachel Royce, for conducting a long affair with a young assistant. Liddle retaliated in kind — a mesmerizing trench war of invective and betrayal that proved, if nothing else, that they both can write. Earlier last month the Spectator's editor, the tousle-haired, rumpled and voluble Boris Johnson — who is also a Member of Parliament, one of the Conservative Party's few truly popular figures, and a married father of four — was revealed to be conducting what Royce, writing in the tabloid Daily Mail, called "rumpy-pumpy at the Sextator" with his "Singular Life" columnist Petronella Wyatt. Johnson's private life is his own business, but Tory leader Michael Howard fired him as shadow arts minister on the deliciously Clintonian grounds that he hadn't told the whole truth about it when asked (which Johnson denies). One executive at the Spectator's parent company jokes, without much mirth, that "it looks like they don't have enough work to do there."

But by far the most tangled and agonizing of the Spectator trysts involves its publisher, a 44-year-old American named Kimberly Quinn, and British Home Secretary David Blunkett, 57, the country's chief law-enforcement officer and one of its most powerful men. He admits that "many people will be bewildered and confused" by the tale. The basic outline of what happened is clear. Blunkett and Quinn took up together in 2001, 11 years after the breakup of his first marriage, but less than three months after her (second) marriage, to Stephen Quinn, 60, the publishing director of British Vogue. Quinn reversed a vasectomy; she underwent fertility treatments. A son, now 2 years old, was born, and Quinn is now seven months pregnant — except that Blunkett insists the children are his, the product of frequent liaisons that continued until she forced a breakup this summer. Blunkett apparently managed to have hair samples collected from the 2-year-old's brush to confirm his paternity through private DNA testing. He was in court last week as part of his attempt to gain paternal access rights.

The court case is not the only sign that Blunkett's judgment has been affected by his feelings for his lover. There is speculation in Westminster that the original kiss-and-tell story that made the affair public was planted by the Home Secretary himself, with the apparent goal of getting Quinn to come back to him. Now she has claimed that he misused his office to help her when they were lovers, putting his reputation and job on the line.

Blunkett has already repaid $340 for free rail travel enjoyed by Quinn, which was was meant to be reserved for M.P.s' spouses. In another incident, he sent two senior Home Office civil servants to a meeting between Quinn and her lawyers when news of the affair was about to break. Most damaging, he is alleged to have fast-tracked the visa renewal of the Quinns' former nanny, though the evidence is inconclusive and he strenuously denies it; the matter is now being officially investigated. Last week Quinn was in the hospital, dehydrated and vomiting, having apparently collapsed under the strain of constant publicity.

Blunkett's private pain has public importance beyond the normal ups and downs of life in Westminster. He is genuinely popular as a remarkable man who overcame blindness and poverty to reach the top of British politics. But many critics also accuse him of a deep authoritarian streak. He has introduced indefinite detention without trial for foreign terror suspects; he wants everyone to carry an identity card containing biometric identifiers; he tried to cut access to jury trials and wants to tell jurors the details of some defendants' past convictions.

Detractors point to abundant evidence that authority in Britain is not always benign: racist police botch major investigations; faulty government databases regularly cause chaos; people are imprisoned for crimes it later turns out they did not commit. When the heat of his struggle with Quinn subsides, Blunkett — if he survives as Home Secretary — will be standing in a landscape littered with evidence that even good people can do screwy things. The next time Britain's top cop is writing a bill to stiffen punishments or restrict liberties, that's something he would do well to remember.

• J.F.O. MCALLISTER | LONDON
• Official London is awash in sex scandal — again. But the latest one amounts to more than just titillation