All you need to know about the fair Kimberley Fortier is that she left hospital with her son William in her arms, writes Kevin Myers.
The boy had not been staying with her there, but she nonetheless was carrying him when she came through the hospital doors. Why? Was it because she knew that there would be photographers there, and this was the perfect opportunity to be seen as a good mother? How right she was. Children can occasionally be remarkably useful little creatures. One spirits an infant into hospital, and then is publicly seen leaving it with one's arm protectively enfolded around the little dear. Perhaps hospitals might consider renting out small children for photo-opportunities for society females who want to be seen as good mothers on the hospital steps. Yet another use for otherwise unwanted asylum-seekers.
The speculation in London now is that numerous ex-lovers of the blessed damozel will now step forward from the ranks of British society. One hopes so. It would add enormously to the gaiety of nations if Wayne Rooney, Cliff Richard, Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Dalai Lama and Michael Barrymore were to claim acquaintance with her loins. Her first husband says she had numerous lovers during their marriage. Clearly, she is as devoted a wife as she is a mother.
London is full of such women, who are drawn to powerful males like horseflies to steaming dung. They are clever, witty, attractive, beautiful, ambitious, unscrupulous and sexually mesmerising. And men - poor dears - are apparently helpless before these creatures. When carnal desire is enchanted not just by overt sexuality, but also by beauty and intelligence, we chaps are like a rabbit being wooed by a cobra's eyes.
Now, here in Ireland, we must not be too, well, pharisaic about this affair. The idea of a minister resigning because he fast-tracked a visa application is as incredible as the notion of an Iraqi minister for tourism. Fixing things like visa applications and planning permissions is what politicians actually do in this country. For years, Fianna Fáil governments treated passports for this Republic - for the very concept of which their political forefathers had unflinchingly gone to the firing squad - as Monopoly money to be showered on smirking foreigners with a murky past who made meaningless promises to invest in vital constituencies.
Yet even in all the squalor of our political life, I cannot imagine two children being turned into the pawns that Kimberley Fortier and Stephen Quinn's children have by both their mother and their natural father, the arrogant and insufferable David Blunkettt. The entire process by which he sought to prove the paternity of the children, and his ruthless desire to assert his "rights" to have access to them, simply reveal him to be a selfish monster. For the primary rights to be considered here, over-riding whatever feelings, ambitions and hopes of the two unspeakable adults now at war with one another, are the rights of the two children - one of whom proved to be such a splendid post-hospital accessory.
The story of Samson and Delilah hovers over the entire affair, but in a strangely garbled version. In the Book of Judges Samson found a beehive in a lion's corpse, and stole the honey, thus conjuring sweetness out of strength. With a comparable paradox, David Blunkett was the Sheffield loony-lefty who became the most right-wing Home Secretary in living memory.
For all his personal strength, Samson's wife nonetheless cuckolded him with his infinitely weaker friend, just as the able-bodied millionaire Stephen Quinn was unable to prevent his wife from having a passionate affair with a blind and relatively poor man. Having been abandoned by his wife, Samson took up with Delilah, who was as intoxicated with money as Kimberley Fortier was with power - probably the main reason for the affair with David Blunkett.
The Philistines had been unable to curb Samson's strength - just as the Tory opposition had been unable to damage Blunkett - so the Philistines promised Delilah eleven hundred pieces of silver to bring about Samson's downfall. Yet he never suspected what she was up to, as she repeatedly asked him the source of his strength. Equally, neither did Blunkett doubt Fortier's good faith, even though she worked for a Tory publication, and had asked him to do politically compromising favours to fast-track a visa for her nanny. (And by God if a woman needed a child-minder, Fortier did.)
Finally, Samson revealed his fatal weakness to Delilah: if his long locks were cut, this would rob him of his strength. Blunkett had an inverse weakness: his absurd and vainglorious paternal pride. Once his hair was cut, Samson was powerless, and the Philistines blinded him; already blind, Blunkett was made powerless by his own hubris.
Samson's captors unwittingly allowed his hair to grow, and thereby his strength to return. Mocked by the Philistines, he heaved on the supporting pillars of their house, killing both himself and thousands of his enemies. No political death, we are told, awaits David Blunkett. We shall see.
I care neither way, neither for him nor his scheming, abominable floozy. But I wonder about the two children, one of them unborn, who are at the centre of this wretched affair, and for whose true welfare only the much-cuckolded Stephen Quinn seems really to care.