Of lice and men

I have kept silent about the Mosley affair, partly because this kind of stuff is so beneath this blog, where we always try to maintain a high standard of reportage.

But The Mail (once again) prompts me to comment. I find if very sweet how everyone is currently trying to deny the apparent Gestapo-fetish that caused poor Max Mosley all the distress that he seems to be in. Really, it was all totally harmless! Says "Michelle", the "vice girl", as the paper calls her, helping to set up Mosley. In an interview with Sky News last night she vehemently "denied the News of the World's claim that there were Nazi overtones to the sex sessions".

Those Nazi overtones again! Instead, "Michelle" claims that the whole thing was "just" an enactment of German prison scenarios.

Because of course in Britain people are so familar with ordinary German prison life (quite apart from ordinary life in Germany) that it dominates (note the pun!) their imagination down to their sad sex lives. There are all these German prison films shown by the Beeb on a Sunday afternoon to educate people in this country about continental carceral procedures. Or the Open University's many late night/early morning educational programmes on "Crime and Policing in Mainland Europe". Set text: Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

That might explain the impressively intimate knowledge some Britons seem to have about standard pratice in German prisons. To which belongs, according to German prison specialist "Michelle": "lice inspection, this that and the other, measuring him up for his uniform, that sort of thing".

This is the bit which caused John to nearly spit his coffee all over his keyboard when I read it to him. So read safely. And have a good Saturday.