Passing a local church in Hove recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see a queue so long that it snaked all around the block into the next street. Until I realised the queue was pointing the wrong way. The back of it was at the door of St John the Baptist’s Church, but the front of it was at the Book Nook children’s bookshop.

I had seen this happen before, when David Walliams rocked up in 2018 to sign one of his books at the aforementioned nook. I actually thought about nipping in myself until I saw the size of the queue. Before he was unveiled as an ocean-going rotter in 2022, I had a bit of a crush on him. His appeal was that, while he appeared to be a homosexual, he was in fact a rampant heterosexual who had been married to the gorgeous model, Lara Stone.

This was nothing new, of course. Sex-mad English celebs have always played on the weakness of women and girls for men who seem fey and gay and harmless – from Marc Bolan of T Rex, a wolf in flamingo’s clothing, to Brett Anderson of Suede, who memorably called himself ‘a bisexual man who’d never had a homosexual experience’. He was a very early precursor to those now multifarious straight dingbats who identify as ‘queer’, despite being married to someone of the opposite sex.