In the wake of the Max Mosley affair, a new perversion has come to light. It’s a fetish that, I suppose, has always been around. Yet until now, it’s been confined to the shadowy corners. We hear it muttered and sighed across middle-class living rooms that smell of furniture polish and buttoned-up, sweaty repression. On rare occasions, it’s banded bawdily across the pubs, between emphatic thumps on the bar with tightly-clenched fists. Semi-comprehensible blurts appear on message boards, furtively typed in the Have-Your-Say section of the BBC News website. Oh yes my friends, that’s right – the real “English Disease” is the kink for moral outrage.

The wank-fodder is right there, in full view, in front of every corner shop, petrol station and news stand: “SICK NAZI ORGY!” shrieks the first headline; “HOOKERS!” the front pages promise; “MADDIE, DRUGS, MURDER, MUSLIMS, KNIVES, SHAME, EVIL, PAEDOS, TERRORISTS, IMMIGRANTS, SEX, SEX, SEX, and more SICK, NAZI SEX, PHWOAAARRR!” shout the rest in a cacophonous chorus of Right-Wing hysteria.

And just as the mainstream sexual fantasies of mens’ magazines – normally perky blondes who don’t grow pubic hair, have naturally airbrushed bodies, and are always up for a foreplay-free fucking – thrive for those who dearly want to believe them, the stunning factual inaccuracies of the morally outraged are printed and absorbed into the consciousness of a public who crave shock and fury, regardless of truth.

Firstly, I should point out that Max Mosley did NOT have a sick Nazi orgy with five hookers. None of the women were prostitutes*, there was no actual orgy, no Nazi theme, and it was not, in my opinion at least, sick. Just as the white English middle-classes are not a persecuted minority, paedophilia, violence, and scary foreigners are no more rife today than they have been for centuries, and the PC Brigade aren’t (and never have been) trying to steal Christmas and replace it with something called “Winterval”. However, mundane reality doesn’t get in the way of a satisfying moral rant-wank for the English complainer.

“We’re going to hell in a handcart!” squeals Mrs N. Petersfield gleefully from behind her stall at the village fete, showering saliva and vitriol across her wares and her audience.

“Throw away the key! Bring back hanging! Send ’em back! String ’em up! Bring back National Service!” snorts Disgusted Of Oxfordshire, rubbing his thighs with his clammy hands as he types, in explicit, barely-literate detail, what he’d like done with hoodies, asylum seekers, single mothers on benefits and, basically, anyone he doesn’t like.

“It’s an outrage!” puffs a retired Mr D. Hornett of Surrey as he masturbates furiously into a golf sock. “An outrage! A RUDDY OUTRAGE! AAAAAH!”

So, next time you’re drawn in by a headline that riles you, just examine what it is that made you want to read it in the first place. Remember that the moral highground is often an unsanitary place to to be. You may just find that your soapbox is just a tiny step away from a world of soggy argyle and self-loathing. Judge not, lest ye be judged – in this case, judged to be a bit of a wanker.

* Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Am just being pedantic about inaccurate reporting.