It is an image that is hard to budge: Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, surrounded by pink vibrators with a pair of leather Y-fronts in one hand and a bottle of love oil in the other.
We would like to stress that nobody, to the Diary’s knowledge, has ever witnessed such a scene, but an exchange on Radio 4‘s Any Questions fired it irretrievably into the Diary’s fevered imagination.
Prompted by a question about sex shop Ann Summers’s legal challenge to a ban on it advertising in job centres, Jonathan Dimbleby asked Doug if he would work there. “I might not be very good for trade,” Doug suggested.
Dimbleby countered that the chain “catered for all tastes”. “I must go in one,” said Doug.
The discussion moved on, but Doug seemed transfixed. Asked at the end of the show about the qualities he would like to exhibit as a spy, he answered: “never to be found in a place where I shouldn’t be, like an Ann Summers shop”. A pair of latex briefs goes to anyone who spots him in one.
