Kenneth Clarke and Lord Bonkers on the way newspapers have changed

In his evidence to Lord Leveson's Inquiry, the Guardian reminds us, Kenneth Clarke recalled his days as a student Conservative, when Harold Macmillan was prime minister:

"Everybody in politics, even a minor parliamentary candidate, knew that the then PM's wife had been having a torrid affair with a backbencher for at least 30 previous years. Not a word of this ever appeared in public print."

Funnily enough, Lord Bonkers said much the same thing back in 1992:

In my young day ... it was common knowledge in political circles that Bonar Law maintained a second household with a large white rabbit called Mabel; yet, while my Varsity chums and I would sit in the front row at his meetings, hold up our hands on either side of our heads and wrinkle our noses throughout his speech, not a breath of the affair ever appeared in the Press.

The moral, he tells me, is to read Lord Bonkers first.