Storm in a pee cup.

I can't see why urinating in a mug and then cleaning it is reason not to stand for public office.

Jerry Bance, a Conservative candidate in Canada’s forthcoming election, has had to stand down for doing just that, and everyone over there is going on and on about it. He, in return, is indulging himself in the Canadian national pastime of apologising all the time.

I wouldn’t stand for public office either, but it’s not because I’ve more than once relieved myself in non-ensuite hotel rooms’ wash basins at three in the morning when I didn’t fancy performing the bishop’s waltz down a darkened corridor with no idea into whom I might bump.

It’s because I flatter myself that I’m a reasonably honest bloke who doesn’t like to lie, dissemble and pretend to believe in things I don’t.

And I rinse out those wash basins too, which brings me to the nub of my argument: SO DID HE. Had he left it there for all to see, I think he would be justifiably disqualified on the grounds of being completely bonkers as well as disturbingly malicious. But he didn't: he did what any sane and socially adjusted person would have done and washed the mug up.

Be honest: how many people ever do THAT in your office's staff kitchen? Be even more honest: DO YOU?

Anyway, given that Bance is a politician, I’d have thought there’s a good chance that his opponents might more honestly (if not more politically profitably) pin one of the above failings on him - lying, dissembling and so on - and thus do him in good and proper.

But no: in North America cheap personal attacks are the way to go, and this is common to both left and right.

Over here we are starting to heave ourselves out of our own, er, bog of irrelevance in these matters, sexual indiscretion. But we’re fast replacing it with a form of character-assassination made worse because it omits those aspects of character that really do need to be examined and neglects common, unspectacular decencies like telling the truth and washing up after yourself.

And be careful, all you up there on the moral high-ground: what goes around comes around.