Brooks Newmark, I once tried to get rid of explicit photos of myself too – your attempts will end in failure

Deleting your past is much easier if you are wealthy. I’d forgotten all about Brooks Newmark, the former Tory MP caught out by a male journalist who posed as a “Tory PR girl” and sent him some images of a Swedish model (who never gave her permission for them to be used). Newmark responded with some very intimate images of his manhood. Claiming he had been entrapped, Newmark’s pleas for understanding sounded hollow when it emerged he had conducted an affair with another woman for two years (without revealing he was married), sending around 40 pictures of himself naked or in a state of undress. #

We’ve all done embarrassing photos in our time, myself included. Many years ago, I had to negotiate with a former partner to get back two explicit Polaroids of me performing a sex act – I can’t recall whether I had to pay cash to get the pictures, but I do remember burning them and feeling very relieved.

That was back before selfies which can haunt you online forever. We routinely read about famous women who have allowed themselves to be filmed having sex with their partners, only to discover the images on the internet when they split up. Brooks Newmark has chosen the usual route for men in his position, engaging the services of a top law firm who claim that any pictures of their client “partially undressed” are his copyright and cannot be reproduced. Remember the pictures of William Hague and Sebastian Coe grappling with each other in judo kit? Or David Cameron and Boris Johnson looking like smug toffs in white tie and tails at the Bullingdon Club? Or Strictly contestant and former Labour Minister Ed Balls in a Nazi outfit at a university ball? All these images no longer enrich our lives – they have been airbrushed from history, unless (like me) you are a journalist with a long memory.

Newmark has no chance of success, because images of him in his pyjamas are everywhere on the internet, have appeared in every newspaper where an editor wants a fluffy story, and are even being used to illustrate this pitiful attempt to sanitise his CV. The only people who should be entitled to clear their internet past are teenagers – and the government (supported by the Children’s Commissioner for England and Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister) is trying to persuade search engines to enable that to happen. They have stopped short, however, of trying to introduce legislation like the Erasure Law in California, which allows children under the age of consent to delete their online material.

Once you’re an adult, it’s your responsibility to monitor selfies – a task which is increasingly difficult. Most of us couldn’t care less about the size of Brooks Newmark’s penis – I was more disgusted by the fact that at the time his body part was being “shared”, he was Minister for Civil Society! Newmark claimed that the newspaper sting, which appeared in the Sunday Mirror, was like being “mentally raped”, which did nothing to further his cause. Newmark should grow up and move on; we’ve lost interest in this particular member.