Sex, Lies and Love in the U.K.

Greetings America. Here in Britain, something very strange is happening – scandal, intrigue, sex, lies, they’re EVERYWHERE. No sooner had we recovered from the news that a member of our House of Lords, one Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, better known as the best-selling novelist Jeffrey Archer, had been sentenced to four years inprison for perjury... than we woke up last week to find that another former legislator, a one-time government minister AND his wife, were being arrested in connection with a group sex attack on a young woman half their age.

You don’t know what to think. You don’t know what to believe.

We know that Prince Charles lives openly with a woman not his wife, the divorcee Camilla Parker-Bowles. This week we have suddenly learnt that the Queen – who is 75 and Head of the Church of England and was always said to be implacably opposed to the relationship – is now reconciled to the prospect of Charles marrying his long-term paramour. It’s not just the royals who are making the news.

Their servants are getting in on the act as well. This week Diana's former butler, Paul Burrell, has been arrested and charged with stealing 342 personal items that once belonged to Diana, her husband and their children. The charge sheet lists the items in bewildering detail – from Diana’s nightwear to her Chanel shoes, from her black gloves to her pink rollneck jumpers, from an Indiana Jones whip to a souvenir photograph of the cast of Baywatch personally signed by David Hasselhoff. You couldn’t make it up. What is the world coming to? It may be bad for the moral fabric of the nation, but, goodness me, it doesn’t half help the newspapers' flagging circulation figures. This is Gyles Brandreth, surrounded by depravity and degradation, for CBS News in London.