Never mind the morality – it’s all about how you deliver bad news

She said the Duke of Wellington groaned over her for hours, which is surprising, given his verbal brevity in all other aspects of his life.

But sex can make a continuous groaner out of even the most monosyllabic of men

HE may not be as big on American TV as Oprah, but David Letterman is big, nonetheless. In fact, he recently became the top-rated late-night host. And may, in the short term, achieve even higher ratings, because scandal can be a great career move.

When Letterman embarked on a monologue at the beginning of his show, last week, his audience, whether in the TV studio or on their couches at home, expected a lot of laughs. Maybe including the odd snigger at other TV celebs caught with their metaphorical trousers down, in relationships (brief) with others (of dubious suitability).

The audience, for a long time, couldn’t get the hang of the story he was telling, which involved him getting into his car in the carpark outside the TV station and finding a threatening letter in it. The letter allegedly promised to reveal all sorts of “bad stuff” about Letterman if he didn’t pay money to the correspondent.

At this point, the audience began to shift in their seats, realising that, whichever way you slice it, such a letter amounted to blackmail and it was highly unlikely that a lengthy story involving a written blackmail attempt was going to end up in a barrel of laughs.

In fact, it ended in a confession.

A defiant, smart-alecky confession.

The alleged blackmailer had the goods on Letterman, the goods being day, date and detail of Letterman’s sexual “flings” with female members of his staff.

The TV host told the audience that – yes – he had been involved in sex, not just with one female member of his staff, but with several. He wound up his 10-minute confession and accepted a round of applause.

It wasn’t clear, at that point, what precisely the audience was applauding. It might have been his honesty. It might have been his clever scripting.

It might have been his well-timed delivery. It didn’t matter – end of confession, on with the show.

It subsequently emerged that the alleged blackmailer is a producer within the TV network that showcases Letterman, that he had asked for and received a cheque for $2 million (€1.37m) as the price of his silence, and that as soon as the cheque was lodged in his account, the police, now that they had enough evidence to indict him, moved in and arrested him.

Leaks quickly emerged that the man allegedly involved was broke and desperate and had lived for some time with one of the women who worked on the Letterman show. In court terms, this one will run and run.

Whether, in TV terms, Letterman’s career will continue to run and run is not clear, although the TV presenter did mention the protection of his job as a key priority in his monologue.

Thus far, his station and his advertisers are standing by him, no doubt encouraged by TV critics’ reaction to the performance as having been a clever tour de force.

Even better, some of them said, than Hugh Grant’s apology for the infidelity which took the form of buying oral sex from a prostitute named Divine Brown and getting arrested for it.

Hugh Grant had been merely mortified and abject and self-derogatory, went this line of criticism, whereas Letterman had been witty and had managed to get 10 minutes of great TV out of it.

Never mind the morals, in other words, feel the performance.

Letterman made something of a virtue out of not naming the several staffers, down the years, with whom he’d had sex, the virtue lying in his protection of their anonymity.

The problem with this approach is that it exposes EVERY individual woman who has ever worked on the programme to lewd speculation and media harassment. Former sexual partners may have their identity protected, but that was done at the expense of the reputation of every other woman on the programme. The likelihood that at least some of those who had sex with Letterman will get money from supermarket tabloids for telling their stories does not diminish in any way the misery of those who did NOT have sex with him.

Whichever way you look at it, setting aside the comedy monologue, this is a tacky story.

Here is a man who married only recently the mother of his six-year-old son, having had a relationship with her for more than a decade, and within hours of his confession, the spin is going out that he never had sex with other staffers after he married her.

Wow. What a relief. He’s been faithful to her for – oh, gosh, it must be at least six months.

He has, in that time, failed to exploit the power he gets by virtue of his employer relationship with the females working on the programme. The forbearance thereby demonstrated is admirable beyond belief.

Now, famous and successful men have always tended to get involved in extra-marital relationships. They have, just for the hell of it, sometimes bought the services of sex workers.

They have, in the process, laid themselves open to blackmail attempts, just as every aspiring model and TV presenter whose current boyfriend spices up their relationship by asking her to email him nude pictures of her or by filming the two of them having sex, lays herself open to later blackmail.

The Duke of Wellington is a classic example. Although he was described at the time as “uphill work” in social terms and as looking like a rat catcher, he nonetheless was an astonishingly successful military man who had knocked the hell out of Napoleon, was adored by the men in what he himself described as his “infamous army” and greatly admired by Queen Victoria.

He did not, however, love his wife, nor she him, according to the great biographer Elizabeth Longford. While still married, he got involved with Harriette Wilson, a well-known courtesan at the time.

She said he groaned over her for hours, which is surprising, given his verbal brevity in all other aspects of his life. But sex can make a continuous groaner out of even the most monosyllabic of men.

Around the time that Harriette’s days as a sex worker were coming to an end, she got together with a pornographer and produced a memoir of her scandalous times.

The pornographer contacted Wellington the week before publication, indicating that he and Harriette could be persuaded to leave him out of the serialisation due toappear in newspapers if he divvied up a bit of cash.

Others so approached caved in and handed over money immediately. Wellington scribbled a one line message across the letter – “Publish and be damned” – and couriered it right back to the sender.

He did threaten to sue if such “trash” was published, but, in the event, did not, and it did him no harm at all. His upward progress to the role of prime minister was not slowed in any way.

The same pattern may apply to Letterman. Of rather more importance is the half-life of his confession. Because, even if ongoing revelations persuade advertisers to fire him, that confession will become a staple replay item on TV. Worth every one of the 10 minutes it takes.

It’s still not a patch on Wellington’s four word scrawl.