In an interview with GQ magazine, Nick Clegg was asked about the quantity and quality of his sex life, and whether he'd ever taken drugs, and almost answered the questions.
(For American readers of my blog: contrary to popular belief the UK has a multiparty democracy. Nick Clegg is the leader of the third biggest political party, the Liberal Democrats. They have a significant number of Members of Parliament but are some way off enough representatives in parliament to form a government because we use a first-past-the-post electoral system, which means few actual parliamentary seats for the Lib Dems even though they often come second in many of the constituencies around the UK.  Oh and like David Cameron who heads the second biggest party the Conservatives/ Tories he is youngish i.e. early 40s, posh, expensively educated and quite goodlooking for a politician).

Journalists then asked the Prime Minister at his monthly press briefling whether these were the sort of questions that a serious politician ought to answer.  I think that tells you more than enough about journalists' questions!

There's been a bit of fuss in the press today about all this, just as there was a few weeks back when Nick Clegg said he did not believe in God.  If he ever became Prime Minister he'd be the first non-Christian to hold the post since Disraeli (and Disraeli was Jewish, so Nick Clegg would be the first open agnostic/ atheist to hold the post).   There's a weird sort of hypocrisy here: I suspect that in famously post-Christian Britain where most people still go to churches to mark the important stages in life (birth, marriage, death) this probably doesn't matter to most people.  After all, most people when asked (as they have been in polls) think that going to war in Iraq was the most morally questionable thing to have been done in British politics for quite some time and that was agreed by a cabinet apparently full of church-going Christians! 
But it would be nice to know from what value system a leader derives his views if only to know how to challenge them.
 
Equally, the Guardian at Easter ran an article on modern teens who see sex as fundamentally unattached to love, something to be engaged in freely and recreationally with people of either sex, as publicly as possible at parties, filmed for the internet etc. 
Generation Y as they are known think that my generation (yep, I was a bit horrified that I do fall into Generation X albeit the tail end) was a bit uptight, unnecessarily afraid of AIDS etc.  They see no problem in obtaining or taking drugs even though they are illegal (names like Leah Betts don't seem to mean anything any more), and think binge drinking either doesn't apply to what they do, or refers to chavs with big gold earrings or middle-class mummies on wine.
I realise that its not all Generation Yers that think or behave like that, but the Channel 4 drama Skins (cast by a friend of mine) has apparently hit a chord - I'd cosily assumed it was a huge exaggeration but there seem to be loads of teenagers who say that it reflects their lives accurately.  I find that a bit depressing.

But the thing is that it seems the same media that runs articles like the one on Generation Y and its attitudes asks whether a serious politician should be drawn into comments about their love life.
If you missed it, it seems Nick Clegg admits to having slept with somewhat less than 30 women before marriage, that his wife is probably the best judge of his aptitude in bed and that whether he may have done in the way of taking drugs or drinking too much at university has no relevance in his life now. 

Well now that's just shocking isn't it.  Surely it makes him unfit to hold public office, to admit that he's behaved just like anyone else at sometime in his life. 

Get real. Even the Amish community allow their young people time to go off and go wild (at the equivalent time to university) - they recognise that having young people behave as they like means they learn about right and wrong and how they want to live their lives, and many of they do return to the community.

On the drugs thing - half the current Cabinet (including the Home Secretary) admit to having tried cannabis at university and jolly well inhaling.  They usually have tosay that they didn't enjoy it and would never do so again.  But they're not taking it now and having tried it doesn't make them unfit to hold office.
On alcohol, the shadow foreign secretary once boasted that while doing a weekend job as a teenager he used to drink 14 pints of beer. Binge drinking certainly, but not something he appears to continue to be doing (although serious professionals everywhere appear to be functional alcoholics... how many doctors, lawyers, teachers etc. can only get through their stressful lives with a little friendly gin which gets bigger over time).   

So it seems very odd to think that talking about these things is a vote loser or not something that should be talked about by serious people.  But that disregards the fact that Generation Y are the new generation of voters.  If Generation X are now in their 30s and 40s and settling down with their kids and 4-by-4 people carriers, Generation Y are the ones with the drive to change the political landscape. 
And talking about things that interest them, however trivial, might not be as lightweight as it sounds.  I rather suspect that Generation Y, if they take an interest in party politics, are not going to expect their politicians to be paragons of virtue and might actually prefer them to be a bit more human.  If the media will ever let them be.

NB this probably all sounds a world away from the debates in the US presidential elections. 
By a coincidence, there's a poll by the Economist on anglosaxon attitudes and whether there really is such a thing that is unique to the UK and USA www.economist.com/anglosaxon 
It's really interesting and reveals that in attitude the UK is actually closer to Europe and Canada than to the USA (I was frequently told when negotiating in Brussels that our arguments were too anglosaxon... I guess they were wrong!)