For many powerful men, public greatness seems to go hand in hand with private indiscretions

Too much puritanical prying could deprive us of some otherwise great leaders

Winston Churchill, with his wife Clemmie, to whom he was devoted (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Perhaps it is more comforting than it should be to hear that Winston Churchill was a good husband. Speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival, Sonia Purnell, author of First Lady: the Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill, said that the wartime PM should be considered a “rarity among alpha males in history” because he was (as far as we can tell) faithful and devoted to his wife during 56 years of marriage. For many powerful men, public greatness seems to go hand in hand with private indiscretions, yet apparently Sir Winston “wasn’t a Bill Clinton with interns, he wasn’t a JFK with actresses … He wasn’t even a John Major with a certain Tory MP”.

It’s not really the done thing these days to admit an interest in what public figures get up to in private. This, it is argued, has nothing to do with competency to lead and should therefore be of no interest to anyone except immediate family. What’s more, too much puritanical prying could deprive us of some otherwise great leaders. Imagine how much worse off we’d be if the FBI had succeeded in using Martin Luther King Jnr’s extramarital affairs against him. And might “Sheriff of Wall Street” Eliot Spitzer have righted the wrongs of the financial crisis if he hadn’t been brought low by a prostitution scandal in 2008?

Last week, former London Transport boss Sir Peter Hendy was allowed to enjoy his Network Rail promotion for all of 12 hours before a kiss ’n’ tell story appeared in the papers. Amusing as it is to discover that Sir Peter considers “four Oyster travel passes worth £10 each” to be a romantic gift, there’s no pretending we learned anything useful about how qualified he is to head up national infrastructure. The truth is everyone has skeletons in the closet; it’s just that most of our closets don’t get wrenched open and rifled through by dogged teams of tabloid journalists.

Yet while infidelity is a minor matter when set against the greater good, that doesn’t mean we should overlook it altogether. Since most powerful people historically have been heterosexual men, dismissing as irrelevant the way a public figure treats his intimates can often mean dismissing the perspectives and experiences of women generally.

Female experience is so routinely erased from history that even Churchill, the hero of our tale, might be considered a part of the problem. Whenever someone quotes his famous witticism – “My dear, you are ugly, but tomorrow I will be sober and you will still be ugly” – spare a thought for the woman on the receiving end. After all, it was hardly unreasonable for that woman, named in some accounts as Labour MP Bessie Braddock, to pull up a colleague for being drunk on the job. Did “Battling Bessie”, the suffragette and tireless campaigner for justice, really deserve to go down in history as a humourless nag?

Ah, the middle-aged of today

Glastonbury turns 45 this year, and as tonight’s headliners, The Who, blast out their slightly-too-ironic-for-comfort 1965 hit “My Generation”, many an ageing reveller will know just how that feels. When a recent survey named Glasto the favourite festival of the over-fifties, it only confirmed a long-held suspicion: Glastonbury is thoroughly middle aged – but don’t take that as an insult.

Pop culture has prized youth over all things ever since James Dean first flicked his collar up against the harsh hectoring of the grown-ups, but, these days, being past it is suddenly where it’s at. According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain’s average age has reached 40 for the first time. Meanwhile, 49-year-old Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans has recently become the most talked-about man in media, despite long ago ceding Radio 1’s youth audience.

Once, hanging around at the party beyond the age of 30 would be interpreted as a desperate and undignified attempt to hold on to youth. Now the party itself is being held in some old fogey’s honour, and the forty- and fiftysomething guests are being accorded cultural prominence in all their fuddy-duddy glory. In a recent New Yorker interview titled “Chloë Sevigny at Forty”, the most widely and approvingly shared quote referred not to the eternal It Girl’s youthful beauty or zeitgeisty instincts, but to her preference for staying in of an evening: “I’m 40. What am I going to do, go to a party in Gowanus with, like, a ‘tall boy’?” Take note, kids, this is now what “cool” looks like.

Since none of us is getting any younger, this cult of middle age must be viewed as a broadly positive development. But it could be better. We could live in a culture that celebrates not just the older, but the elderly. That way, everyone could look forward, not back, to some golden years of guaranteed financial security, good health and social status. Hmm … maybe next century.

Wholly expensive

According to a NYC Department of Consumer Affairs investigation, Whole Foods has long been overcharging its customers. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever shopped there. The chain, which has nine branches across the UK, is known as much for its high prices as for its health foods. But then, when you pay £4 for a tomato, you’re not just buying a salad item; you’re buying, to use the marketing lingo, a lifestyle. Thus the only surprising thing about this overcharging “scandal” is that the health food store has bothered to rebut the claims. We all know that retailers levy a tax on snobbery and most of us are only too proud to pay it.

Animal magnetism

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has foreseen the future and, in it, robots keep humans as pets. So now might be a good time for us to start being a bit kinder to our own animal charges. I’m thinking particularly of Shabani, the heart-throb gorilla at Higashiyama Zoo, Japan, who in recent months has attracted a large, mostly female and, I’m sorry to say, human fanbase. Apparently the ladies love him for his “rippling muscles” and “brooding good looks”, which they praise on Twitter as well as queuing for hours to pay visits in person. I can’t be the only person who feels that openly perving on a primate is in bad taste. Even if we overlook the interspecies taboo, as a caged animal, it’s not like Shabani has any means of escaping these lascivious attentions.

Twitter: @MsEllenEJones