On the sun-kissed beach, a blonde in a bikini walks hand in hand with her companion. Every now and then, the couple kiss and he fondles her. Both betray a hint of middle-aged spread, and she, with her leather tan and dyed hair, a touch of vulgarity.

The couple are compromised by the click-flash of a paparazzo: for the man is famous - and married to someone else.

So far, this ordinary tale of an adulterous affair could be French, Australian or Italian. What gives it away as purely British is the follow-up. Once back home, the brassy blonde visits Max Clifford, the press agent who made a fortune from marketing "kiss-and-tell" stories, and asks him to sell her tawdry tale of sex with Jeffrey Archer - for it is he, strolling along the warm sand in post-coital bliss - to a tabloid. A quarter of a million pounds is what Nikki Kingdon wants - a bit steep for revelations about a week of missionary positions with a nondescript fiftysomething, but Nikki is a logo queen with a taste for Prada and Gucci, and smelled a quick buck. (In the end she had to make do with £100,000 and without Max Clifford's championing. He had instead taken on as a client her ex-boyfriend, who received a reputed £50,000 for telling his own tale to the Mirror, in which he claimed that Nikki "is certainly not the victim. If anyone has been caught, it is him.")

Kiss and tell is a profitable British industry. What makes it so is the Anglo-Saxon puritanism that will not accommodate extramarital affairs - or, at least, will not do so publicly. This hypocrisy leads to a situation laden with paradox: the adulterous partner prepared to betray the celebrity is not punished, but rather rewarded with a small fortune and 15 minutes of fame.

In a Latin country, our brassy blonde would have been laughed out of the newsrooms of the Sun's Continental equivalents. If an Italian politician or a French bestselling author takes a lover, it is not news. Unless he is dipping into the public purse to keep the mistress or toyboy in style - as is the case with the present naughty scandal that is keeping le tout Paris hooked to their newspapers - a public figure, whether married or not, can enjoy himself with a consenting adult.

Latin cultures accommodate the odd extramarital dalliance. Men's coffins, like Francois Mitterrand's, are accompanied to the graveside by their mistresses as well as their wives; wives take the children away on three-month holidays known as "the breathing space"; une garconniere, originally the "bachelor pad" for all discreet assignations, is now a generic term for a studio flat. Couples come together on the unspoken understanding that a fling every now and then will be tolerated. This live-and-let-live attitude may spring from machismo, but it protects the matriarchy: the man - and, increasingly, in Italy (studies show), the woman - allowed to stray from the marital bed is less likely to leave the marital home. And on the Continent, marriage is not sacred but the family is.

It's a philosophy that often mystifies Anglo-Saxons. I remember speaking to a friend of my mother's, an English rose who, within moments of landing at Rome's da Vinci airport, had taken up with a married man. She was amazed at how openly her lover paraded her from one party to the next. She was also relieved, if surprised, at the warm welcome his relatives, including his 80-year-old mother, had extended to her. Adultery was woven into the social tapestry; and as long as she did not tug at his heart strings and try to unravel the fabric of the family, she would be accepted by all.

In a sophisticated culture which accepts that a husband may have a mistress and a wife may have a lover, kiss and tell holds no threat for the married celeb caught in flagrante. There may be a few red faces, the occasional raised eyebrow, but no one need fear blackmail. Better this, surely, than keeping Nikki Kingdon in Prada and Gucci for the rest of her life.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website