Political sex scandals - an historical perspective

I'm not sure why Malcolm Fraser and his visit to Memphis did not make the historical list published in the Melbourne Herald Sun a few years ago but it's a starting point. Jim Cairns and Juni Morosi, Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot, Labor PM Ben Chifley and his secretary, Bill Snedden and SA Premier Mike Rann. Wonderful memories.

In Britain, where the press is less inhibited than journalists in the Canberra press gallery, provides some wonderful examples. There's a lively little summary on the BBC website looking at "Why MP sex scandals no longer shock" and the record of the Conservative government of John Major puts the Australian examples in the shade.

But it was the government of John Major in the 1990s that is perhaps best remembered for its fallen politicians.
In 1992 the national heritage secretary David Mellor resigned after his affair with the actress Antonia de Sancha continued to dominate the newspapers.
"The particular difficulty on that occasion was that his party, generally, was claiming the moral high ground about the family", while Mr Mellor himself also had a bad relationship with the press, Mr Cole says.
Only a year later Major's government launched the morally charged "Back to Basics" campaign, which sparked intense media interest in MPs' private lives.
First to fall was environment minister Tim Yeo in 1994, who was exposed for fathering an illegitimate child with Conservative councillor Julia Stent.
His resignation was followed by a string of others, including that of the minister for aviation and shipping, the Earl of Caithness, whose wife committed suicide following his infidelity, and the whip Michael Brown, who the tabloids claimed had had an affair with a 20-year-old man.
Eventually Mr Major himself would admit to having had a four-year affair with the Conservative minister Edwina Currie, prior to his premiership when he was a whip in Margaret Thatcher's government.

Personally I have always had a fascination with the speculation about US President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Catch the conversation British Prime Minister Harold McMillan recorded in his diary as told in this video.

And surely Bill Clinton would be a gold medallist

Back in the summer of 2016 Vanity Fair looked at what it called a very unscientific study of "Which political party has better sex scandals?" An extract:

My own, unscientific—and, in fact, brazenly biased—sense is that Republicans get tangled in the web of conventional morality more often than Democrats. I haven’t even mentioned all the right-wing family-values preachers with wide stances on the Appalachian Trail in recent years. Or some of the men who were so vociferous in their condemnation of Bill Clinton—such as Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who at the time was conducting an extramarital affair with a woman on the Hill, later to become his third wife, and Senator David Vitter, whose phone number was found in the records of the fabled “D.C. Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and who admitted that he had sinned. Or the current governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, a former church deacon and Sunday-school teacher who (thanks to what the press calls “lusty audiotapes”) is believed to have had an affair with his married top aide (a charge they both deny), and who now faces impeachment. Or the raft of potboilers by Republican writers—from Newt Gingrich (“Suddenly the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress”) and Lynne Cheney to Scooter Libby and Bill O’Reilly—that could themselves be turned into lusty audiotapes.

Could it be that these conservatives are fighting an inner battle on the public stage? Or is that too simplistic? Perhaps conservatives are just sexier than liberals and can’t stop themselves from misbehaving. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s not that conservatives tend to be pervs (as Donald Trump charmingly called Anthony Weiner) but that pervs tend to be conservative. Or maybe a belief in free markets leads to a belief in free love. All that talk about the “invisible hand” can give a guy ideas—and make him think he’ll never get caught.

Even a brief survey like this one would be incomplete without a reference to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berslusconi who was engulfed in a sex scandal involving a 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer, Karima El Mahroug, known as "Ruby the heart stealer." Berlusconi, owner of AC Milan football club and a billionaire media mogul, held wild events, known as 'bunga bunga' parties at his private residence, to which he would invite numerous prostitutes. He was found guilty of paying for sex with minors and of asking the head of the Milan police to release Mahroug, who was being held on theft charges and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. He was later acquitted of all charges on appeal. His wife left him soon after the allegations surfaced.