Sure beats Friday night bingo

Baron John Sewel has caused a scandal in the UK.

We live in a beautiful, peaceful country. The Prime Minister has us designing a new flag. Labour leader Andrew Little wants a new national anthem. We truly are blessed.

Meanwhile, in Westminster, a 69-year-old life peer has two young ladies to his flat, tells them "I just want to be led astray", and proceeds to snort cocaine off a bare breast. His 45-minute drug-fuelled sex romp is caught on camera and becomes front-page news.

Baron John Sewel was Deputy Speaker and chair of the House of Lords' Privileges and Conduct Committee. Days earlier he had unveiled new powers for expelling badly behaving peers, saying: "The actions of a few damage our reputation. Scandals make good headlines." Indeed. The Sun headline proclaimed: "Lord Coke: Top peer's drug binges with 200 prostitutes. And he's the one in charge of standards." The newspaper had him on the front page wearing an orange bra and leather jacket and snorting coke through a rolled-up 5 note. All this just a quick walk from the pomp and pageantry of the House of Lords.

The Sun reported an earlier escapade in which Sewel slipped into a blue dress and applied lipstick and eyeliner to engage in depraved sex games "too obscene" for the paper to describe.

The blue dress, no doubt, made a fetching change from his parliamentary garb of full-length scarlet wool robe, a collar of white miniver fur, closed at the front with black silk satin ribbon ties, and open from the shoulder on the right-hand side.

After the front-page expose, his wife is not expecting him home, the police have raided his flat, and the Baron has resigned his House of Lords' seat-for-life.

Now that's scandal. We can't match it. Our scandals are lame. MP abuses waiter; minister buys wine; leader doesn't disclose donation.

There are times when New Zealand seems a little small and distant and, well, boring. But distance allows perspective.

Does Sewel deserve it? Not to my mind. Few of us have lived lives of such blameless excellence that we couldn't be embarrassed by a front-page splash of a bad bit of it. What the Baron puts in his own body is his business. So, too, his sex life. It was all consensual, all adult, in the privacy of his own flat.

Sure, he's a hypocrite for not pushing to legalise all drugs but politics makes hypocrites of us all.

The Rolling Stones no longer party. They have got old. So I can't help but have a sneaking regard for a 69-year-old ex-politics professor, ex-city councillor, who spends his days chairing the House of Lords and his nights snorting coke off young ladies' bosoms. It sure beats the hell out of the old people's home and looking forward to next week's bingo.