Does it come as a surprise to anyone – anyone at all – when I say that while I’m going to pick my links with the utmost discretion, one of them goes to Stringfellows and another to a similar house of lust, and while there’s no nudity where I’m linking to unless you click through to it, you may not want to have to explain how you came to be browsing strip club sites while at work? Or that, if you are a child or a person of vulnerable moral compass and tender emotional state, you should not visit these libidinous and turpitudinous offerings without sober consideration and discussion with your guardian or ethical advisor?

All right, then.

Lap dancing. (Don’t worry, that one’s for the Beeb. Nice and safe and texty. I shall mark the naughty ones with *s.) The Conservatives have been looking – not unreasonably – at making it harder to license a lap-dance club. Incidentally: ‘sex encounter club’? Yeuch. And I think that wording opens a discussion most MPs would rather not get into. Anyway…

What’s happened now – in case you still don’t trust me enough to click on the link – is that:

Conservative MPs have been given discount vouchers for a lap dancing club near their party conference venue.

Quelle horreur.

And, to be honest, not a great shock. The idea that the Tories don’t do hot nekkid babes is *a teensie bit laughable*. Yes, that is indeed Baroness Thatcher with Peter Stringfellow. She doesn’t look thrilled about it, but thrilled was never her most obvious emotion. And the cheery cherub in the main picture is, of course, our beloved future PM and all round man of the people, David Cameron.

But it’s the ever-bizarre Anne Widdicombe who really steals the show. She’s a remarkable woman. She never surprises me with the kind of thing she says, but boy, does she know how to find the strangest possible way in which to say them…

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, a former shadow home secretary, told the Sunday Express: “I can hardly believe this is true.

“I know the Conservative Party is supposed to be modernising but do we have to throw every value out of the window?

“Can you imagine what our old ladies are going to make of it if they turn up there by mistake?”

The den of vice in question is called *The Rocket Club* and seems to be themed around parrots. I haven’t seen their promotional material, but I doubt very much that it leaves any ambiguity on the issue of what can be expected inside the parrot-styled doors. More than that, though, I think Ms Widdicombe under-estimates her base. Little old ladies who are eighty now were born in the twenties. Many of them are mothers, and the mysteries of nookie are known to them. Some will even have been strippers themselves (yes, even among Conservatives.) More than a few will have been very naughty girls during the decades back then when bed-hopping was rather more common than we tend to assume. And even those who were not will probably be quite able to deal with having almost gone into a bar before deciding to go elsewhere. We’re talking about the generation of women who served in the army as radar operators, who endured bombs falling hither and yon, and reconstructed the country in the aftermath.

I sincerely doubt a boob or two is going to cause them any major upset.

But I love Widdcombe, as ever, for introducing a completely new, mad way of looking at the situation, and for the image she conjures so splendidly of sweet, dotty old bird turning up at the Rocket Tea House at 8pm sharp looking for a spot of Darjeeling, somehow evading the bouncer, and sitting in growing horror at the endless bar under the red lights, watching the girls go by wearing nothing but a feather and a mortarboard hat.

For all that, as far as I can see, the old lady in question is more likely to be horrified by the awful music and the price of the scotch than she is by the nudity.

The Rocket Club, by the way, was in the news two years ago after displaying poppies over the door to raise money for the British Legion.