always had Ulrika Jonsson down as a smart cookie, but she seems to have blown it. In so far as convincing the editor of a Sunday newspaper that paying 700K for first dibs on the most salacious bits of your autobiography can be considered blowing it, that is.

Regular readers, friends and family, and
anyone who has spent more than 30 seconds in my company during the last couple of years will be aware that I once had lunch with Ulrika. I was interviewing her at the time, a fact I
occasionally forget to mention when relating the tale of our one-on-one repast together in a trendy New Bond Street eatery.
I can’t remember the exact date, but in Ulrika-years, it was post Stan Collymore and pre-Sven Goran Eriksson. A few months after our lunch, during which she had complained at length about media intrusion into her private life, she appeared on the cover of Hello! or OK! magazine looking heavily pregnant with a big question mark daubed on her bump.
Speculation over the identity of the man who had put her “in the club” seemed to be rampant and, as is customary, Ulrika was milking it for all it was worth.
There was never any speculation as to whether or not I had slept with her and was among the likely candidates, despite rigorous attempts on my part to generate some. If there had been, obviously I would have done the gentlemanly thing and chosen not to talk about it. That way, I could have appeared chivalrous while simultaneously allowing people to labour under the delusion that I might have slept with Ulrika Jonsson, even though the nearest I got to a shag was having a sip of her cranberry juice.
In the past, my notoriously big mouth has seen to it that I have never been accused of being chivalrous, while assorted other shortcomings mean that I have never been accused of sleeping with women like Ulrika. To get accused of both at the same time is the kind of thing that is beyond my wildest dreams.
As I never managed to pull it off, I have nothing but admiration for Sven Goran Eriksson, who did, with considerable aplomb. Everybody knows he had an affair with Ulrika, but because he steadfastly refuses to talk about it, he is described as being very dignified. When it emerged that he might have been less than discreet with his pillow talk, possibly engaging in chitter-chat about the minutiae of his job as England football manager, he continued to maintain his silence and became a hero.
Here was a short, balding, bespectacled, middle-aged man who, not content with bedding one of the most lusted after sex icons of
modern times, had allegedly managed the unprecedented feat of steering the post-coital conversation around to the subject of football. As masterstrokes go, this is the work of a genius.
Imagine a scenario, gentlemen, where upon being asked what you are thinking by a woman you have just defiled, you get to say: “Well darling, I’m thinking that if Wayne Bridge moved up to the left side of midfield, we could drop Emile Heskey and play Michael Owen and Alan Smith up front as out and out strikers.”
Now imagine a similar scenario, but one that doesn’t end with you getting elbowed violently in the ribs and sent to sleep on the sofa. It’s just too implausible. Or so you’d think, but unlikely as it sounds, Sven might just have managed to pull it off.
And when you consider that he managed to get this information into the public forum without once talking about it to anybody, all you can do is take your hat off to him. If you could bottle class like that, it would fly off the shelves.
At the time of writing, Ulrika’s attempts at payback have been lame, to say the least. After all the sensational speculation, the first installment of her autobiography was tedious and revealed little that will have caused Sven any concern. After all the Ulrika-related
hoop-la that surrounded England’s trip to Slovakia, he must have been laughing up his sleeve upon discovering that “he told his girlfriend he was at football matches when he was really having sex with me” was the best she could do.
Short of revealing that Sven asked her to wear a set of false buck teeth and a Brazil shirt in bed, her inability to keep schtum prior to the serialisation of her autobiography means there is very little she can tell us now that will shock us more than the original news that she had ponied the Swedish manager of the England football team.
She would have been well-served to have taken a leaf out of former Tory MP Edwina Currie’s memoirs. Another money-grubbing kiss-and-tell merchant, Edwina kept her powder dry until the very day her memoirs were serialised, when it was revealed over breakfast to a gob-smacked nation that she had, er, enjoyed a four-year fling with former Prime Minister John Major.
And before you ask, let me state for the record that I have never had sex with Edwina Currie. Nor have I ever interviewed her over lunch. In fact, I’ve never even met Edwina Currie. However, my old man does own a share in a racehorse that looks very like her, so if our paths ever do cross, we’ll have something to talk about. After that, who knows what might happen?