DON’T talk to me about kiss-and-tell! And don’t even think of mentioning the sneaks who go behind your back and ‘tell all’ to the newspapers for money.

This biter has been bit . . . I have been turned over by a past master!

For sixteen years I nursed a secret. Not dark, but deeply and ruinously embarrassing. All the time I consoled myself with the thought that by keeping shtum I was protecting a family from prying eyes and vicious tongues.

Until . . . THUMP! The Sunday papers landed on the doormat outside my hotel room. It was my poor wife who picked them up, saw the headline and thrust the topmost paper towards me, speechless with shock.

“Oh my God,” I wailed. The words swam before my eyes: “Prescott – My Secret Battle with Bulimia”.

It wasn’t so much the headline that made me want to throw up just as he once did: like I say, I’d known about the Deputy Prime Minister’s eating disorder ever since he told me the gory details (over dinner!) shortly after I became editor of the Mirror in 1992. Now here he was, invading his own privacy by dangling a tasteless titbit in front of the readers to promote the newspaper serialisation of his soon-to-be published autobiography.

No, what really got my goat was how Prezza smugly recalled his first visit for treatment: “The waiting room was full of young women, I was the only man there. I felt a right twerp. Luckily none of them shopped me to the press.”

I could hardly contain my fury. A journalist robbed of The Big Story by a victim who does his own mudslinging . . . it’s indecent, almost unheard of! And what would that jury of my peers, those mocking men and women of Fleet Street make of it (I was staying with two hundred of them in Glasgow for a big media wedding at the weekend)?

Little point in claiming that I had obeyed the guidelines laid down by the Press Complaints Commission over a person’s privacy in health matters. Or that there was no overriding public interest involved. Nor even that I considered the conversation to have been private.

Sure enough, next morning’s Daily Telegraph claimed on its front page that I had “suppressed” the story when, in fact, I simply hadn’t told a soul. Interviewed on radio later that morning, one listener who didn’t much care for John Prescott attacked me for not revealing the politician’s health problem.

Dear reader, while Prezza goes off to bank his book royalties I am left to draw about me the shroud of my tattered integrity against the chill moral of this sorry tale:

You’re damned when you do but you’re dumb if you don’t.
 

MY WIFE goes off with Other Men at the weekends. It’s an arrangement we have learned to live with.

’Er Outdoors takes to the hills with the booted and backpacked Berwick Ramblers (all right, half of them are women) leaving Me Indoors with my computer and half-a-dozen deadlines to meet.

One of her gallant escorts on those day-long expeditions up Cheviot and over Kielder is our friend Griggsy, long retired from education but a world traveller, raconteur and environmentalist who still extracts the maximum pleasure from life.

Walking is David Griggs’s passion and he has produced a masterly collection of eight wonderful walks which range between one and eight miles long, criss-crossing Griggsy’s beloved parish of Ellingham and all of them suspiciously using as their start and finish points the pleasant Pack Horse Inn.

Bound in a sturdy volume and illustrated with maps, photos, historical notes and numerous wildlife observations, ‘Walking from Ellingham’ is a little masterpiece, terrific value for a fiver, and will be available from Mine Host at the Pack Horse from this evening onwards.

Published: The Journal, Newcastle   April 25, 2008