THERE can be no greater triumph in life than having a potato named after you. King Edward, Maris Piper and Peter Barron have all been placed upon such a potato pedestal.

In fact, Peter, our editor, was so overjoyed by the honour that Darlington council has bestowed upon him that he took us to lunch to celebrate. "It's Pete's Hot Potatoes all round," he cried, throwing caution to the wind while carefully pocketing the receipt for his expenses.

WT Stead, our most famous editor, bought a 13-year-old girl for £5 in London to expose the evils of child prostitution; Peter Barron can now buy a Pete's Hot Potato for £2.50 in the Dolphin Centre, having exposed the scandal of the council's differently-priced jackets.

And they say campaigning journalism is dead.

In the name of investigative journalism, I decided to discover who this Maris Piper fellow was and why King Edward should share potatofication with our editor.

Potatoes come from South America where the Incas adored them. They buried them with their dead, they applied them to broken bones, they even measured time with them: a unit of time was the average length it took to cook a spud. Don't worry, it'll take less than half-a-potato to digest this column.

These batatas came to Europe with the Spanish conquistadors of the mid 16th Century. It may have been the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 that introduced them to this country - villagers on the south coast found these strange, pebbley things washed ashore after the fleet went down. Alternatively, it may have been explorer Sir Walter Raleigh who first grew them in 1589 on his estate in Ireland. Pleased with his crop, he sent some to Queen Elizabeth as a gift.

Her chefs - potato virgins - decided to throw away the inedible-looking pebbley bits and boil up the stems. As the potato comes from the deadly nightshade family, the stems are poisonous and the Queen and her courtiers fell badly ill.

This, and the fact that it did all of its growing out of sight underground where it was clearly in league with the devil, caused the potato to be viewed with hostility in Britain.

The French went further. They detested the potato. They believed that it caused every sexually transmitted disease known to man and it forced people to have rampant sex (there is, though, no truth in the story that French youths indulged in such wildly irresponsible binge potato eating sessions that they ended up having sex with one another in alleyways).

The potato was finally popularised in Europe by Antoine-Augustine Parmentier. He was held hostage by the Prussians during the Seven Years War (1756-63) and fed solely on potatoes. He realised how nutritious they were and, to relieve the boredom of seven years of spuds, how versatile they could be.

When released, he hatched a cunning plan to convert his countrymen. He placed an armed guard around a field which immediately aroused the curiosity of the French peasants.

One night, Parmentier removed the guards. In crept the peasants, desperate to find the treasure.

The field was full of it - all soily and muddy! The peasants carried it home triumphantly for a wash.

Since then, we have developed more than 5,000 varieties of potatoes. Some have descriptive names, like Purple Peruvian Fingerlings (which are purple, come from Peru and are shaped like fingers). Others have people names, although disappointingly no potatologist has been able to explain why King Edward is a tuber or who Maris Piper was.

And so this piece of investigative journalism has failed to uncover the truth, but at least I can bask in the glory of a crusading boss whose efforts have provided affordable nutrition for the masses and whose jackets are selling like hot potatoes.