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"Your typical loyal Conservative wife" has long been a synonym in some circles for what the rest of us shirt-lifters affectionately call "fag-hags". Actually - it's a bit more than that - she is a byword for heterosexual "cover" for gay men wanting to make their way in supposedly homophobic conservative politics. Ffion Jenkins got the same when she married Willie Hague. If truth be told, the same was said of Sarah Gurling, now Mrs Charles Kennedy, and of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown.

So, it's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say "sexual confusion" and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along. Doubly, trebly in this case, tragic when there are children involved. But no more so than if he was running off with another woman. So all credit to David Cameron if he holds to his word and refuses to judge Greg Barker's political ability and future on what is a bit of a personal mess. This is, after all, the twenty-first century, and not the nineteen-eighties when his party would be condemning his new "pretend family relationship" with legislation.

Since Greg is 40, and I am approaching the same, I can identify with him in a way - certainly my feelings have changed, becoming more open to finding love in people of either gender. It's not terribly trendy to say so in the entrenched "gay community" just as much as the "heterosexist community", but we need to appreciate that sexual identity is more fluid than the last two or three hundred years' of predominantly British macho-masculine history has led us to believe.

Has he always identified in secret as "gay" but been living a double life? He's sired three children, after all. People change in all sorts of ways. Loves change. He seems no better, or worse, than anyone who, after some years of marriage, has lost the fire that was once there and fallen for someone else. The gender of his new love should make no difference to the rest of us. It likely will to his kids - just because other children can be the cruelest.

But...he did work for one of those Russian kleptocrats we grace with the term "oligarch". That's the real skeleton in Mr Barker's newly redecorated closet. And if he ends up getting fired for anything, it should be the hug-a-huskie stunt he led his boss on a few months back!

But if there are young, gay, Tories out there (I can never quite understand why) Cameron's support for Barker will I hope make them think twice about taking on a fag hag till death do they part for the sake of a selection meeting.

I noticed this in the Oxford Mail the other day:

Get Rid Of Gravestones Says Councillor (from thisisoxfordshire):

UNSTABLE gravestones in Bicester's cemetery have been laid flat and could be thrown away if not claimed by relatives within two years.

In the past, Bicester Town Council has repaired unsafe headstones, but councillors say it is simply becoming too expensive.

A total of 28 unsafe memorials, whose owners cannot be traced, have been laid flat or cordoned off in the cemetery.

At a meeting last week, town councillor Carol Steward said the council needed to adopt a firm policy for the future.

She told fellow councillors she believed unsafe memorials should be removed, stored for two years and then disposed of if relatives had still not come forward.

She said: "People could miss an anniversary or Christmas for two years. Any less and I think we would be doing the families a disservice.

"This is the only way the council can afford to go forward. It is a very, very costly item for which we are not actually responsible we have been doing it to be fair to everyone. We have to draw the line somewhere."

Now, it may be a bit morbid, but these stones are our future's history. Whether they leave people behind to look after them or not, are the memories of those people simply to be erased after two years? There are odd rules governing management of cemeteries in this country for a very good reason. We have municipal and church owned graveyards. When a church one gets full, it is "closed" and responsibility for managing it in perpetuity falls on the local council.

Now I realise Bicester is looking more and more like some anonymous "new town" as a result of housing policies. But that does not mean the people there should have their memorials and memories wiped out so presumptuously.

How much will rebuilding the Garth cost compared with this saving, by the way?

Gordon Brown was quite effusive, for him, over the sad (though at ninety seven one could never say untimely) passing of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Maybe he should read "Money: Whence it came, where it went".

If Galbraith did one thing, I would say it was to challenge the idea that economists have some monopoly on wisdom that ordinary folk were excluded from. Rather, he claimed, they made up rules and complex models deliberately to obfuscate logic so that even the best educated who were not in their little club would accept their dictums unquestioned.

Too bad Gordon Brown didn't seem to pick that up in the advice JK gave him.