OH heck, that’s torn it! Poor old Godfrey Bloom of Ukip just doesn’t understand the rules. He’s been offensive to women, but the only people allowed to be that are footballers, fundamentalist Muslims and all those rap artists so lovingly reviewed by The Guardian.

Godfrey called a roomful of women “sluts” and so he has had the party whip withdrawn and finds himself temporarily in the naughty corner. The decision to withdraw the whip was taken by Ukip’s very go-ahead, politically-correct party chairman Steve Crowther. I’m afraid Godfrey, as an unreconstructed “old fart”, is not at all the sort of guy the thoroughly modernised apparatchik Mr Crowther wants to see in the Ukip front line.

I do have some sympathy for Godfrey Bloom. Of course the BBC and the lefties (including Tories) in the media seized on his gaffe with delight: what a gift for all those who have a vested interest in seeing Ukip fail.

The gaffe and the machinations of the press have ensured that what made news at the excellent Ukip conference was not Nigel Farage’s courageous airing of the immigration issue, or indeed any of the whole range of policies proposed by the party, but this little bit of silliness. We have to be quite clear about what actually went on: “slut” is a word which has acquired a completely different connotation these days from the one it used to have. Now it means a woman of loose sexual morality. What it used to mean was a woman not given to being clean and tidy about the house. And that was the meaning attached to it by Bloom – and incidentally by the room full of women to whom it was addressed and whose response was to laugh the house down. One of them had admitted as part of a joke that she never cleaned behind the fridge. And that’s why Bloom jokingly called her a slut. Nothing sexual about it.

The problem extends far beyond Ukip and its present troubles. The whole party conference scene is just such a boring sham, a series of PR acts, all about image and presentation.

That’s what politics has degenerated into these days – just another branch of showbiz.

How different things used to be. The Labour Party, for example, used to have balls – now they’ve only got Balls – and I can remember when they would tear themselves apart at conferences most agreeably over issues such as nationalisation and unilateral nuclear disarmament.

I remember how their leader Hugh Gaitskell banged the table and shouted, “I will fight, fight, fight to save the party I love.”

I recall the scheming rats among the Tories – Butler, Macmillan, Powell, Selwyn- Lloyd – savaging one another over the leadership issue in 1963. It was finally settled in favour of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who renounced his peerage to become leader of his party and for a brief period prime minister.

There were delicious spats at the time, notably from Harold Wilson, who described Sir Alec as “the 14th Earl of Home”. And Home replied by calling Wilson “the 14th Mr Wilson”.

I remember with terrific glee the narcissistic malice of Tony Benn and the caustic ironies of Denis Healey; the collective apoplexy when Enoch told Tories to vote Labour over the common market issue; the sharp intake of breath when someone accused Harold Wilson of being in the pay of the KGB; the scandal of the Crossman diaries.

Those were the days, when there was real blood on the carpet. Now there’s only the fake tan procession of sound bites and photo calls.