Here's the latest entry in the Diary of Rupert St John-Fontaine, adviser the Department of Social Affairs

WHAT a week! The plan to stitch up Sleepy Hancock has gone more smoothly than any of us could have hoped for. What the great British public don’t understand is that we have literally hours of snatched video footage like this on most of the party bigwigs stashed away for a rainy day.

The Whips Office also has recorded conversations, furtive billet-doux and actual receipts for pizza-box deliveries of the old Bob Marley and Bob Hope which are easily identified by the customer’s distinctive scrawl.

We also possess one rather glorious example of the genre – a rather lubricious and eye-watering filmed orgy featuring S- P-; T- K- and M- A-TON; five members of Donald Trump’s Security Detail; Prince A- and three royal footmen which took place on a Bouncy Castle in Buckinghamshire after the Lord Mayor’s debutantes ball.

Basically, we have a reciprocal agreement with the Russians. We use their spooks on a sort of deniable, arms-length basis to collect data on the peccadilloes of our people and, in return, we hand over footage of their top wallahs as required. The Spectator’s annual summer bash is a veritable cornucopia of illicit and unusual couplings.

During deepest lockdown when the PM was rattling with the Covid we arranged private screenings for him of the best of these incidents to keep his flagging spirits up. How we all laughed, ha-ha, at one of these special matinees when the PM, sparkled with the Pimms, felt moved to comment on the – how can I put this – rugged features of the S------ ambassador’s wife as she divested herself of her Wonder Woman costume.

“No-one looks at the um, er, mantelpiece when one is um, stirring the ashes, what? Bravo! Bravo,” shouted the PM.

The various clubs and associations at the House of Commons also provide a rich source of material. Who knew that the cross-party, 19th Century Deckchair Collector’s Society was a front for a leather and whips, self-flagellation group?

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Worshipful Temple of Third Degree Satanists think their membership list is known only to its adherents who risk a midnight decapitation on Solsbury Hill if they divulge its existence. But I have in my desk a sealed envelope with the names of three former Chancellors, four former shadow cabinet secretaries and Enoch Powell.

We’ve been trying to trap Monsignor Rees-Mogg for years, especially when he was getting ideas above himself during Brexit. But the best we could manage was a videotape of him withholding food from one of his sons who’d stumbled while reciting the Iliad in the original Greek.

I actually felt sorry for Hancock. In the sheer, cinematic sweep of Westminster perversion and drug-fuelled beastliness his inexpert fondling of Gina Coladangelo’s shapely fundament was a mild transgression.

Indeed the PM took me aside after PMQs and asked me to tell Hancock that once he’d dealt with Cummings by releasing that tape of him dressed as the Wicker Man beside Durham Cathedral during lockdown he’d bring him back into the fold at Transport or maybe Northern Ireland.

He also asked me to deliver a large bouquet of red roses to Ms Coladangelo along with a hand-written note of sympathy. “Dear Ms Copacabana. I’m so sorry that you’ve had to endure such humiliation over what I firmly believe to be a private matter.

“I’d like to convey my deepest regret on a meaningful, one-to-one basis. Perhaps I could invite you to my private rooms underneath the Speaker’s Chair one Saturday when there won’t be many people to invade your privacy. I can issue you with a special pass and have my driver pick you up and assure you

of the utmost discretion. I’m always at your service, Boris. PS: Might I prevail upon you to wear that diaphanous little black number you had on in that wretched video?”

At the end of a fraught week I settle down to open the emails I’d neglected. One is marked Top Secret and has an ominous-looking video attachment. It comes with a blackmail demand of 10 grand to be paid in the usual way: a brown, cardboard-backed Facchetti and Pichi envelope with 10 large in used 50s.

The grainy footage is quite shocking, really. In it, Dopey is seen kissing – rather gently it has to be said – an elegantly-dressed woman. A hidden microphone picks up his conversation.

“Shall we go to the cinema? Jungle Book’s on at the Curzon. Afterwards we could go for some jelly and ice cream.” The woman is none other than Mrs Williamson and they are seen holding hands. Then he says: “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” and she giggles very coquettishly.

If this gets out we’re all Friar Tucked. Everyone in the party will be held to these depraved standards of wholesome deportment. This has to be suppressed.