The texting cheat? Give me a break…

TV star Vernon Kay’s admission to having text sex affairs with five girls, including a page 3 model, is nothing short of political correctness gone barmy.

How can you have an affair via a mobile phone? Call me old-fashioned but to me the word ‘affair’ conjures up images of steamy trysts in hotel rooms and intimate dinners in out of the way restaurants where no one is likely to spot you. And in neither of these scenarios is one of the participants busy tapping messages into their phone.

Sending flirtatious texts or emails is not cheating. If it were then I have been unfaithful for most of my married life. I often sign off an email message with a X to people I might not kiss if I met them in the supermarket. The fact is that the whole culture of flirting has been radically changed by the arrival of the mobile phone and the Internet. We have very quickly become a lot less formal and also more flirtatious. What cannot be said face to face without being considered a little too risqué can very easily be said via a machine. Precisely because there is no risk of actual physical contact. In my view flirting on an email or text is less dangerous than a bloke walking into a pub and flirting with a barmaid in person– which would hardly make front-page news.

Vernon says he would send messages like ‘I saw you last night and your dress was sexy’. Hardly ground-breaking stuff, but he now says he was “stupid”. The only stupid thing he has done is to give the whole scandal any credibility, even if some of the messages were smutty.

In France, where I lived for nine years and where infidelity is seen as crucial to keep one’s marriage alive, Vernon would be seen as a pretty normal bloke, apart from the fact that he has not, as far as we know, actually spent a cinq a sept with any of his text friends. Any full-blooded Frenchman would have saved money on his phone bill and popped over in person.

Helena Frith Powell is the author of Two Lipsticks and Lover published by Arrow Books