PLATELL'S PEOPLE: Why can't sex-text MP just say sorry?  

• e-mail

To his former Harvard contemporaries and fellow Conservative MPs, Brooks Newmark seemed to have it all. A happily married father-of-four, the self-made millionaire had just been made Minister for Civil Society.

Then his world collapsed overnight after the 56-year-old was caught sending explicit pictures of himself in a sting by a red top newspaper.

Brooks Newmark, right, thought he had been sex-texting a young Tory activist when in fact he was sending semi-naked photographs, left, to an undercover male newspaper reporter working on a story

He thought he had been sex-texting a young female Tory activist; in fact it was a male undercover reporter.

It subsequently transpired he’d also been conducting a two-year affair with a young woman, also bombarding her with naked pictures.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the entrapment he was clearly a licentious idiot — and the last person who should have been lecturing Britain about a civil society.

Yet fast forward seven weeks and guess what? Newmark claims that he is the real victim of the whole sordid affair. In an interview for his local paper he says he feels ‘mentally raped’ and ‘violated’ by the trauma of his public humiliation.

What an outrageous and offensive thing to say — not least to the genuine victims of sexual assault.

Despite his education and privilege, Newmark was little more than a pathetic middle-aged man who was solely responsible for his own downfall.

The only real victims are his wife and children, whose lives have been turned upside down by his reckless stupidity. And they could surely have done without him airing his delusional grievances so publicly.

Newmark went on to blame his behaviour on depression, which he suggested was linked to a relapse of the anorexia he suffered in his teens.

While I have every sympathy for those battling mental illness, is there nothing he will not dredge up to try to excuse his deplorable behaviour?

It’s the same with every politician and celebrity who’s caught lying or cheating: they seem incapable of accepting responsibility for their actions and saying sorry.

Instead of this sob story, Newmark should have just apologised unreservedly and left it at that. If he’d had the courage to admit he had behaved like an utter fool and hurt and humiliated his family then he might just earn their forgiveness.

Instead we have the self-pity of a foolish man who believes he’s the victim. It’s as unedifying as Newmark’s original naked selfies.

Pippa Middleton has just completed her advanced certificate at the Grape Experience Wine & Spirit School. Meanwhile, her brother James has been busy spilling gossip about Kate to help promote his marshmallows business on American TV. So, a certificate in drinking and a quick cash-in on royal connections. Truly, the talents of those hard-working Middleton siblings never cease to amaze.

Much outrage over self-styled ‘dating guru’ Julien Blanc bringing his lecture tour to Britain. His advice is a modern version on ‘treat them mean to keep them keen’ and advocates choking women as a sure-fire method of seduction. Didn’t work too well for Charles Saatchi, now did it?

Labour's face of hatred

Just hours after the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies, a group of Labour MPs were chuckling their way through an anti-war comedy night.

Performers mocked the ceramic poppies at the Tower of London, laughed about killing the Royal Family (even though the Queen had defied a direct terror threat to attend the Cenotaph that very day) and joked about lynching Tory minister Esther McVey.

Surprised? No, this was the ugly, sneering, hate-filled face of the Labour Party.

The response from Ed Miliband and his deputy Harriet Harman?

A deafening silence. Which just proves how out of touch Red Ed really is.

Mick's curious way of tackling trauma

The Rolling Stones have settled their £8 million insurance claim over the concerts they were forced to cancel after L’Wren Scott’s suicide.

A wise decision.

Mick Jagger claimed the suicide of L'Wren Scott prevented him from performing on stage.. but not in bed

Mick claimed to have suffered acute traumatic stress disorder after his lover’s death, which prevented him from performing on stage.

It didn’t seem to have stopped stop him performing in bed, as those pictures of him with a young ballet dancer just weeks after L’Wren’s funeral proved.

A Taylor-made rear 

An American DJ has started a campaign to buy Taylor Swift a bigger bottom

The perfectly pert, fantastically successful singer Taylor Swift is being taunted by an American DJ who has started a campaign to buy her a bigger bottom. Let’s hope they don’t plan on getting her a Kim Kardashian-sized derriere or the U.S. deficit will be in serious trouble.

The NHS’s medical director has advised people not to go to A&E when they’re sick but to visit their chemist instead. Professor Bruce Keogh has clearly never spent five hours in an A&E late at night among the drunks and drug addicts, as many of us have, or he’d know we’d have to be seriously ill to go there in the first place. And that most local chemists close at 6pm.

Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall repeats the claim that he slept with more than 1,000 women in his early career. I suspect that’s only if you count the young girls falling asleep from boredom during one of his concerts. 

Jungle Drums

Eyebrows were raised on hearing the veteran reporter Michael Buerk is taking part in I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here.

His reports from Ethiopia at the height of the famine in 1984 are credited with generating millions in donations and inspiring the launch of Band Aid. So why is the 68-year-old putting himself through such an ordeal?

Perhaps being in the jungle was the only way he could avoid having to listen to Bob Geldof’s Do They Know It’s Christmas remake. There’s only so much a man can take.

A driver who turned into a quiet London street and parked on a double yellow line to observe the two-minute silence was given a parking ticket dated 11/11, 11.01am. When she tried to explain, the parking warden looked at her blankly, then ignored her. Shame we can’t fine jobsworths for pig-ignorance and crass insensitivity.

Gwynnie's so blank

Gywneth Paltrow says she likes her wrinkles 

At 42, Gwyneth Paltrow says she likes her wrinkles and tries not to scrutinise them. ‘I appreciate the incredible life I’ve lived and all I’ve learned. I like that all of that is written on my face.’ Given there’s about as much ‘written’ on her line-free face as there is on my non-stick frying pan, she can’t have learned very much.

Jennifer Aniston has revealed she’s had a tattoo tribute to her beloved late corgi terrier Norman inked on her ankle. What a relief she has only the name of her dog inscribed and not the men she’s dated along the way — or she’d be tattooed from head to toe.

Sleazy millions

Max Clifford’s ex-wife reveals in a TV interview that she was sickened when she found a binbag full of explicit photographs of some of the many women her ex-husband had abused over his 50-year career.

Not so sickened that she didn’t leave him and their £3.5million home until after he was charged.

If she really feels so terrible, then perhaps she’ll donate some of the settlement she got from the millionaire sleazebag to his victims.

After the Philae robot landed on a comet 300 million miles away, the project was said to be ‘one giant leap’ for European co-operation. A fitting metaphor for the EU indeed — it took ten years to get there, cost £1.1 billion, no one’s quite sure what it’s for . . . and it fell over on landing.