AND THE BEAT GOES ON . . .

There are times when you come across a single piece of information about somebody that makes everything else you know about that person fall neatly into place. A fortnight ago, Cliff Richard gave an interview to a leading Singapore newspaper in which he came out as a passionate advocate of three disciplines – the daily application of moisturiser, the practice of herbal medicine and the infliction of rattan cane lashes on the bottoms of petty criminals.

The Peter Pan of Pop was speaking to the Straits Times, as part of a publicity puff to promote a series of concerts in Singapore. The Singaporean penal system is notorious for its brutality and extremism. Their draconian catalogue of statutory sanctions ranges from the merely outlandish (a fine of £420 for failure to flush a public toilet after use) to the barbarous (the death penalty is regularly handed down for even relatively minor drug offences).

Caning, however, is the punishment most commonly doled out by the country’s authorities, for everything from vandalism to burglary. And it is this form of chastisement in particular that seems to have left the eh, deepest impression on Cliff. Not normally a man given to making political pronouncements in public, the 54-year-old bachelor boy was obviously so overcome by the proximity of all those felonious buttocks quivering beneath the avenger’s birch that he just couldn’t control himself.

Harking back to his own strict upbringing in colonial India, where as young Harry Webb, he was regularly thrashed by both his father and his schoolteachers, Cliff spoke of his “unwavering respect for the law,” and his belief in the merits of the short, sharp shock. “If something is against the law, there must be some punishment,” he trilled. “Otherwise, don’t have laws.”

This tells us a great deal. For one thing, it proves that Cliff’s much-vaunted born-again Christianity is very much the traditional, vengeful brand. In other words, God is the way, the truth and the light but if you so much as look crooked at one of His commandments He will fucking have you. Cliff’s declaration of faith in the efficacy of a good whipping also provides new insight into the rationale behind the name of his current album and world tour, The Hit List.

After a dogged thirty-five year refusal to be drawn on anything more controversial than the dietary rewards of broccoli salad, Cliff Richard has decided to dramatically break his silence by giving the thumbs up to one of the most authoritarian police regimes in the world. That requires a neck, not to mention a brain, constructed from only the most calcified jockey’s-gonads.

It’s not as if he wasn’t aware of the full extent of Singapore’s state cruelty. Last year, the attention of the whole world was sensationally focused on the subject when a holidaying American teenager, the idiotic (but beautifully-named) Michael Fay, was lashed four times with a rattan cane after he had been caught spray-painting vehicles in a municipal car-park. Even Bill Clinton, a death-penalty enthusiast, thought this was a little over the top. But not Saint Cliff.

Presumably, Saddam Hussein can expect an expression of congratulations (and jubilations) from Cliff any day now, applauding the Baghdad tyrant for his firm stance on the issue of law and order. Shocks don’t get much shorter or sharper than the amputation of hands and tongues, the treatment that Saddam has been meting out of late to draft evaders, thieves and dissidents. It’s so funny, how they don’t talk anymore.

Am I being grossly unfair to Cliff here? Of course I am. He deserves it. If he’s going to start mouthing off about the societal benefits of institutionalised mutilation and maiming then he had better get used to being associated with some pretty unsavoury characters. When it comes to the crime and punishment debate, he is now on the same side as Gay Mitchell.

Of course, Cliff being Cliff, he may be just as smitten by the erotic potential of caning as by its punitive value. By his own gleeful admission, he hasn’t had sex with another person since the early 1960’s. He is therefore, one assumes, a prodigious wanker, a relentless choker of the chicken. And, as the song almost says, these tissue nights, they’re the longest.

Given the fervour of his Singaporean outburst, it is not unreasonable to suspect that Cliff fills his masturbatory reveries with fantasies about bare bums and bamboo. It’s worth noting too that Cliff’s only real-live romantic dalliance during recent years has been with the tennis champion, Sue Barker, a woman known to pack a powerful backhand.

It is probably the innately Biblical connotations of caning which appeal to the sedated libido of his holiness, all that retribution, all that atonement, all that smarting flesh. Ultimately, it’s the age old story, of cane and (being) able. The Lord whelps those who whelp themselves.

Thanks to the Strait Times, we now know the dark secret that Cliff Richard has been sitting on for so long. He is not so much UK Pop’s Dorian Gray as its Marquis de Sade. His face may be the epitome of eternal youth but you should see his arse.