Of the many shamelessly self-promoting food processors currently crawling all over British television screens, Gordon Ramsay is the least appealing. That he should allegedly have ended up with one of Jeffrey “Pinocchio” Archer’s cast-offs is about what he deserves, especially one who’s so cheap she’s happily sold her story and posed for the country’s most pernicious Shag Rag.

But even foul-mouthed, culinary bullies are entitled to privacy – however many more alleged lovers the Screws may try to haul from his cupboard. Their specious claim that the revelations are in the ‘public interest’ because Ramsay has proclaimed that he loves his family, is as tarnished and fatuous as it ever was. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, it’s more than likely that Ramsay does love his wife and children, and it isn’t the Screws business to gainsay it. If he was engaged in any external liaisons, he was probably keeping them from his family so as not to hurt their feelings.

And whatever Ramsay does in private behind closed doors, as long as it is legal and doesn’t undermine his public persona (such as it is – he is not the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Minister for Family Values) he has a statutory right, under Section 8 of the Human Rights Act passed by our government (though not strictly upheld) to respect for his privacy.

But the Shag Rag editors couldn’t give a monkey’s doodah about the law, as long as they think they’ll shift more copies of their nasty little organs to a gullible public. After all – there’s no one who’ll stop them. They’ve certainly got nothing to be afraid of when the Press Complaints Commission bares its toothless gums.