I was meeting the director of a charity that puts children aged between six and 16 in contact with adults who can help them. The man with the money lamented that no British children will receive the charity's help for a good while, due to its "terror of the tabloids". With paedophile frenzy scaling new and dizzying heights in the Sun and the Daily Mail, the charity's most important company sponsors are feeling a little edgy.
Over coffee in south London, the millionaire philanthropist was blunt about the charity's chances of success in Britain: "Our sponsors are making us sign contracts whereby, instead of asking for linked PR, they want written guarantees that their name will in no way be linked to ours - for the time being. This is precisely the reverse of what is normally required. Yet they back us to the hilt."
The shyness of the sponsors is not fear that a child will suffer through the charity's work, but fear that an innuendo-filled headline, along the lines of "Charity could be paedo's paradise", would be disastrous and spell ruin for everyone concerned. Top players in the government who were initially ready to endorse and aid the charity - it has been successful abroad for almost a century - are also changing their tune, and are now dragging their feet in the face of tabloid terrorism.
I have been asked to "Lauren up" (or Lauren down) the language used in the endless forms that every side needs to fill in before the good work can begin. God knows, they need it: page one looks dauntingly like a council tax form. It even asks for details of "others in your household". I felt guilty just looking at them. "What made you ask me to rework them?" I asked, when offered the role of "linguistic mover and shaker". I imagined that he'd read some of my lengthier articles for the New Statesman or the Observer. But he started to laugh, which was not what I had hoped for. "My son used to read your stuff in Front," he said, bluntly. He couldn't help tittering into his latte. "It was, you know, funky, down-to-earth: rude, yes . . . crude, no."
Being a sex agony aunt was great fun at the time, but it was also a long time ago. My page was friskily titled "Lozza's Lounge of Love" and included letters (supposedly from readers, but mostly from the editor) along the lines of: "Before sex, I like to play pants volleyball with my girlfriend. Keeping the pants in the air is the only way I can now get a stiffy. Am I ill?" My ingenious reply would follow thus: "Put your pants in the wash and play with your girlfriend instead, you creep."
Anyway, the forms that you fill in to become a volunteer for this children's charity are painful, to say the least. They form the basis of the vetting system and are as thorough as they are essential. Charity workers check every referee by letter and phone interview. But instead of banning the use of relatives as referees, this charity demands that one at least should be "a close blood relative who has had frequent contact with you over the last ten years".
This seemed a bit pointless to me. After all, who wouldn't say "My son Bob's a great guy" when asked? The answer is: parents with "doubts". It's called the "mummy test". Any mum who finds an excuse not to fill in the form, or who refuses to answer questions about her kid's suitability during a five-minute phone interview, gets the applicant a "red flag". In psychological profiling terms, a mum who does not instantly say "He's perfect to work with kids" is saying: "I have my doubts about him, and there was that weird thing with cousin Norma's kids when he was drunk . . ." Further checks are carried out, but this hesitancy on the part of a family member almost always means the applicant will be rejected.
My role is to make sure that the enthusiastic volunteer can be bothered to get even halfway through the forms without thinking: "Sod this, I could be playing pants volleyball with my girlfriend."
