EXTRAMARITAL legovers remain an activity of longstanding popularity, even if they do try to hush it up in places Norfolk. I can illustrate this by an anecdote from my own family history.

As far as I can work out from amateur genealogical research, the village of Hilgay – just four miles from Downham Market – is the ancestral home of Oslerdom. I’ve managed to get back six generations, and for two centuries at least, my ancestors happily farmed the local land and kept the village inn, pausing only to interbreed with the Porters and the Bells.

But in a spurt of initiative, my grandfather Willis Albert Marmaduke Osler decided to widen the gene pool, and how, apparently after picking up a taste for continental totty as a result of his service in world war one.

I never knew him personally, but as a slightly shocked old Norfolk auntie once confided in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘he loiked the ladies an’ that kinda loife.’

According to census records, Willis had four children by three wives, one of them German and one of them French. Then, in the 1980s, I was introduced to a middle-aged man I had never before heard of, and told that he was actually my half uncle, courtesy of a liaison between granddad and the barmaid at his pub. Yet such is the stigma of illegitimacy in that part of the world that, much to his personal pain, he was never acknowledged by the family. This story is sad but true.

Conservative Central Office knows full well that Norfolk has yet to come to terms with the permissive society. That much is evident from the fate of superstar blogger Iain Dale, who was Tory ppc in Norfolk North in 2005.

Theoretically, the ultramarginal seat should have been his for the taking; the Lib Dem majority was just 483. But instead, incumbent Norman Lamb increased his majority to 10,000-plus. The most obvious explanation for this is that Iain is, of course, gay.

It must surely have dawned on the Cameroons that efforts to strong-arm the local troops into the twenty-first century are doomed to fail. Activists of all parties should back the right of the local Conservative Association to endorse only the kind of candidate with which it feels comfortable.

So I hope that the splendidly-named Sir Jeremy Bagge and his mates in South West Norfolk – so condescendingly dubbed ‘the Turnip Taliban’ – resist pressure from the party machine and proceed with the deselection of Elizabeth Truss, after her failure to ‘fess up an extramarital affair with a Tory MP some years ago.

Her status as a Scarlet Woman is neither here nor there. When it comes to fidelity, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Or at least I have, anyway. A parliament free of adulterers would be scantily populated indeed.

But look at the scandalous way Labour selections have occurred since circa 1994. The wishes of constituency parties have routinely been brushed aside in safe seats such as St Helens South, Blaenau Gwent and Calder Valley to ensure that New Labourites prevail. Expect more of this nonsense in the next few months, with reports that Harriet Harman’s hubby Jack Dromey is being lined up for Leyton & Wanstead.

Ms Truss would surely make a model candidate in the many, many places where getting a bit on the side is not an issue, and I devoutly hope Iain will find somewhere a little bit more open-minded in time for the next general election. But I suspect Norfolk is not the ideal location for either of them.

But doesn’t democracy dictate that those prepared to keep the show running on the ground - year in, year out – should be free to choose who they want to put in all that unpaid work for? Victory to the Turnip Taliban against the forces of metrosexual imperialism.