No sooner had Matt Hancock wrecked the CCTV camera in his office, jumped into the ministerial Range Rover and sped off, pausing in the night only to say goodbye to his wife and children before his infidelity was splashed in the morning, than the Westminster rumour mill moved on to another target.

This one is another senior politician and today there are rumours that a newspaper may deliver another coup de grâce. Or perhaps not. It could, of course, be another product of the fervid parliamentary gossip, passed on to journalists in the Commons dark drinking dens, or to other MPs and spads (special advisers) on the Thames Terrace over Pimm’s, now that the better weather is here.

Gossip always has a malevolent purpose. It could also be a deliberate attempt by a rival camp to blacken and unseat a minister a rung above, sent out on social media to do just that. It could all just be entirely baseless.

There’s a long history of entanglement between powerful politicians and those who want to sexually dally with them, normally unpicked by a newspaper red top, followed by a press call where the grimacing wife and kids are pictured pledging their continuing allegiance to the tumbling minister. Although these set pieces are rarer now that women are no longer prepared to deal with the mound of dirty laundry, actual and emotional.

We have come through three distinct phases – call it a quasi-sexual revolution – over senior politicians’ sexual behaviour and how it is treated by the media. The first was ignoring. Move on. It’s known by the need-to-knows, other MPs and hacks, but it wouldn’t do for it to come out: it might unsettle the peasantry.

William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, was the first British prime minister to be dismissed by the king in 1834, not for his sexual peccadilloes – which included not just spanking the willing but whipping orphan girls he brought into his household – but for opposing reform.

A 15-year affair

WILLIAM Gladstone enjoyed the birch but consorted with prostitutes throughout his premiership, David Lloyd George was a womaniser all of his life, puritanical Ramsay MacDonald had a 15-year-affair with Lady Margaret Sackville, a poet, but no quips about rhyming couplets.

There’s barely been a British prime minister who didn’t put it about. Even John Major with Edwina Currie, although before he won the top job. So, in that respect, Boris Johnson is just following an inglorious tradition.

The bridge to the second phase came in 1963 – the year sex was invented, according to the poet Philip Larkin – when the Profumo affair was revealed. John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, had started an affair with 19-year-old Christine Keeler, which was widely known among louche circles but then he lied to parliament in March, alleging there had been no “impropriety whatsoever”, and was forced to resign. Nowadays lying to parliament is almost a rite of political passage.

Then came the second phase, open season, coyly kiss ’n’ tell, where newspapers, led by Rupert Murdoch’s News Of The World, outed politicians for their affairs, feigning outrage but shovelling loads of cash to the woman – it was usually a woman – involved.

There was no justification that it had impaired the minister’s job, that such information could be useful to an enemy, or that it was stiffing the taxpayer – that it sold newspapers was justification enough.

The actress Antonia de Sancha, although few had seen her perform outside the bedroom, was paid £35,000 in 1992 to reveal her trysts with married David Mellor, dubbed Minster for Fun due to his position as secretary of state for national heritage.

Although you may wonder what is fun about looking after crumbling castles and fading artworks. And boy did Antonia embellish it. There was a graphic of the house where the events took place and of the bedroom where he made love to her in a Chelsea shirt. He denied it, the shirt part at least.

Chelsea smiles

MELLOR resigned, went through divorce, but didn’t do too badly afterwards with media gigs and a hook-up with his present partner, a former close aide – you see the pattern? – Penelope Lyttelton, aka Viscountess Cobham. But at least David is continuing the team theme. Cobham is where Chelsea train.

If there is collective noun for a group of politicians it’s probably lie, because that’s what a succession of them did when caught post-flagrante delicto. Some did even worse. The Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe enlisted, allegedly, an incompetent hitman to assassinate his former lover Norman Scott. In the end, only Scott’s Great Dane Rinka got it between the eyes. All the conspirators, including Thorpe, were acquitted but he demitted his post.

The oleaginous Cecil Parkinson was forced to resign as trade secretary from Margaret Thatcher’s government when it came out that he had a love child with his former secretary, which he at first denied.

It didn’t exactly stall his progress. Thatcher brought him back as energy and transport secretary and, being a loyal accolyte, he fell on his ministerial sword when she resigned, only to regain it when he was made a baron in the House of Lords.

Then, in 1992, Westminster was seething with rumours that the newly-installed Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown had been having an affair with his secretary and that she had been paid £50,000 for a kiss ’n’ tell. She had actually turned the money down.

Ashdown thought that he would get milder treatment if he fronted it and declared all, so he went before the cameras with his dutiful wife of 30 years, Julia, looking up adoringly at him. Not a wise decision. Next day’s headline dubbed him with the immortal moniker Paddy Pantsdown.

Archer targeted

LYING, however, can lead to a prison cell. Jeffrey Archer, then deputy chairman of the Tory party, had sex with the prostitute Monica Coghlan and when the press got wind of it he paid her £2,000 to leave the country. In what you might describe as a prototypical Prince Andrew defence, he said that not only had he not had sex with her he had never even met Coghlan. Unfortunately, he didn’t realise his payoff call to her was being recorded by her in cahoots with the News Of The World.

Nonetheless, he sued The Star for libel and won record damages of £500,000 plus costs. Fourteen years later, his fabrication was blown apart and he went to jail for four years for perjury and perverting the course of justice. By then he was Baron Archer of Weston-Super-Mare and he still continued to churn out dreadful novels. He still is.

There have been good lines which would grace any novel about parliamentary canoodling, and would enliven Archer’s. Catherine, the first wife of Nicholas Soames, who has recently been publicly dubbed as a serial sex pest by Westminster women, described having sex with him “as having a very large wardrobe with a very small key falling of top of you”. He’ll take that to his very large grave.

The third phase of sex and our elected libertines is justification. The former health secretary is the examplar. IPSO, the press watchdog, has a pile of cant called the Editors’ Code of Practice, which includes rules on privacy and what is permissible and not, and how people can’t be filmed in public or private without their consent.

Except if it’s in the public interest, words which mean, as Humpty Dumpty almost put it, whatever you want them to mean.

Hancock, who clearly had enemies in his department and is a bit nonplussed about the scope of technology, made it easy for The Sun to point out his hypocrisy, caught like a salivating schoolboy on a first date, maskless and clueless, with a married woman.

It wouldn’t have made a difference if he had been winching and groping a fellow MP, a consenting tea lady or the guy who shuffles round the mail, rather than a woman he had hired on the public purse.

Gubbed.

Whether or not there is another famous victim today one thing is sure: fidelity is interred.