Stormy Daniels' claims about Trump join a long list of cringeworthy anecdotes about the private parts of politicians

I find myself, genuinely for the first time, contemplating Donald Trump’s bell end, rather than as a bellend – an important distinction. Never mind the trade war with China, the looming conflict with Iran or the stresses inside Nato: the Big Story is that the presidential meat and two veg have been disparaged in a memoir by Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had an affair with the president, if the encounter(s) can be dignified with such a term.

I can’t put it better than Stormy does (in any sense): “He knows he has an unusual penis. It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool. I lay there, annoyed that that I was getting f**ked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart.” She adds that it all added up to the “least impressive sex I have ever had”, but is less clear on why. Trump’s todger is said to be “smaller than average”, but “not freakishly small”.

Now we know full well that this will not stand, so to speak. Such is Trump’s egotism that his wedding tackle will have to be defended, with all means at his disposal. Maybe he’ll whip it out at one of those rallies for his “deplorable” supporters in West Virginia or somewhere. That’d certainly distract attention from Robert Mueller’s much less impressive probe, I’m sure, and make Donald’s c**k great again.

Maybe he’ll stick to an indignant Tweet, with or without a picture, along the lines of the remarks he made when people suggested, with no anatomical expertise whatsoever, that his tiny hands implied other tiny extremities. Or he could take the promise of those Yeti pubes and take up the hobby of “manscaping” or public topiary as I prefer to term it. If his barnet is anything to go by, his barber could confect quite an interesting sculpture downstairs too. The hairspray might sting a bit.

Strange and amusing as the tale of Trump’s old man might be, it isn’t such a novelty. As with so much else at the baser end of public life, we only have to travel back to presidency of Bill Clinton (1993-2001) to find similar episodes of penile dementia. After all, Clinton's lawyer once had to issue a statement that: “In terms of size, shape, direction, whatever the devious mind wants to concoct, the president is a normal man. There are no blemishes, there are no moles, and there are no growths.” Dignified, no?

It was the Paula Jones harassment case – one of a few dredged up by Trump in the 2016 presidential election – and much was riding on Clinton’s c**k. Jones had claimed that Clinton exposed himself to her in an Arkansas hotel room some years beforehand, and that what she saw was not normal at all. Her affidavit, a precursor to Daniel’s memoir Full Disclosure, detailed what she said were the president's ”distinguishing characteristics“. Namely: His erect penis is about five inches long, has the circumference of a quarter (a shade less than a 2p coin for British readers) and heads off at an angle.

Anyway, he didn’t have to submit himself in a state of tumescence to a Supreme Court judge, for which history must be grateful.

There are plenty of other presidential Percy precedents, in fact. The famously earthy Lyndon Johnson (1963-69). As one biographer noted, gloriously, of his time in the US Congress:

“He early became fabled for a Rabelaisian earthiness, urinating in the parking lot of the House Office Building as the urge took him; if a colleague came into a Capitol bathroom as he was finishing at the urinal there, he would sometimes swing around still holding his member, which he liked to call ‘Jumbo’, hooting once, ‘Have you ever seen anything as big as this?’ and shaking it in almost a brandishing manner as he began discoursing about some pending legislation.”

“At the same time, he would oblige aides to take dictation standing in the door of his office bathroom while he went about emptying his bowels, as if in some alpha-male ritual assertion of his primacy. Even on the floors of the House and Senate, he would extravagantly rummage away at his groin, sometimes reaching his hand through a pocket and leaning with half-lifted leg for more thorough access”.

It is often the case that public figures, usually men, become undone when former lovers describe anatomical details that could only be known from some degree of intimacy. When former Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe was on trial for conspiracy to murder a former boyfriend, Norman Scott, Scott was able to describe how the politician had “nodules” under his armpits. Jeffery Archer was humiliated when a sex worker, Monica Coghlan, said he had smooth shoulders but a hairy back. Perhaps apocryphally, a joke went around Westminster for many years that being made love to by Nicholas Soames was like having a wardrobe land on you with the key left in it. The darkest rumours about Edward VIII focused on his sexual habits, and how Wallis Simpson, a rather plain gel, was unique in her ability to satisfy his possibly malfunctioning orb and sceptre.

It’s all good. When we can still ridicule the rich and powerful, we cut them down to size, and we reassure ourselves that we live in a free society, and that they are only human too, with human frailties. After all, we all know Hitler only had one ball, and Goebbels had no balls at all. Next time you see president Trump dismantle the international order, threaten war with Iran and throw kids into prison, just remember the toadstool and the Yeti pubes.