We giggled on Friday when Jonathan Ross interviewed Old Etonian Conservative leader ’Dave’ Cameron. (Perhaps American readers might need a note of explanation here. Ross is the best-paid interviewer on British TV - think Letterman or Leno with a lisping London lilt. His interviewee is the leader of the Her Majesty’s Official Opposition).

Cameron is young enough to have been a teenager when Thatcher was Prime Minister.  Ross asked whether he’d ever fantasised about Mrs T in stockings, then posed the blunt question when faced with evasive answers:

“Did you or did you not have a wank thinking ‘Margaret Thatcher’?”

Cameron, to give him credit, dealt with the situation very well. But the tabloid press are now up in arms - witness the outraged front page headline in today’s Mail on Sunday (whose rabidly right-wing readers are actually the most likely to have thought about Mrs T in such a way):

OBSCENE! ROSS MAKES THATCHER SLUR TO CAMERON

That set us thinking. We’d not thought anything of the exchange, other than that it was a funny moment (albeit a little childish). Are we so out of touch with the morals of the nation?

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