TO PARAPHRASE Mrs Merton: “So Tracey Temple, what attracted you to the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott?” Was it really only his title, his great office of state, his absolute dominion over green-belt planning applications, which persuaded a perky fortysomething to sleep with a toad-faced pensioner? Is she really, in the Mirror’s ghastly potential Spoonerism, a “power-hungry hussy”?

The idea that Prescott might actually be attractive to a living woman other than his missus, independently of his status, is seen as ludicrous. After all, he is overweight, uncultured, taciturn and short-fused, when the male ideal is now a groomed, gym-honed, emotionally literate metrosexual who carries lip balm in his man-bag.

But I bet there are a surprising number of women seeing Prezza sweep his ample diary secretary off her feet in his ham-like arms who understood, even if they didn’t feel, the attraction. Youth and conventional good looks remain far less important to women than men. Attentiveness is a powerful aphrodisiac: John Mortimer, who even when young was among the ugliest men who ever lived, managed to seduce gorgeous starlets merely by snake-charming them with words:

“It takes 15 minutes for them to get over my face,” he once said.

But Prescott’s appeal rests upon something more basic: a general virility and crude masculine energy. Actors Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, James Gandolfini and Ross Kemp all have the mien of hung-over builders who’ve just had their vans clamped. They’ve spent whole careers playing mouth-breathing, bum-scratching, monosyllabic and violent men. And still there are legions of female fans who dream of being rogered by them roughly and urgently over their kitchen work surfaces.

When the American journalist Norah Vincent spent 18 months disguised as a guy called Ned to write her book Self-Made Man she went on several dates with women. Ned was much praised for “his” ability to listen, intuition and dress sense. But, as one woman, describing her perfect partner, put it: “I’m looking for someone who can drive the bus.”

Prescott could drive that bus or even, as a former seaman, a roll-on, roll-off ferry. As the photographs show, he boogies like a dancing bear, he sweats, he grabs his lover with undisguised desire, he laughs down at his own bulging belly. He is visceral and full-blooded while others are cold and measured: Mark Antony to Blair’s Caesar.

How would the PM have reacted to an egg pelted hard on the ear at close range by a burly farm labourer? With his all-purpose half-apologetic smile? The rest of us would do as Prescott, lash out in surprise and pain. Likewise Prezza, in his puppyish delight, made little attempt to disguise his affair: cuddles on the office sofa, nuzzles in the lift, pulling daft faces to make her laugh. Whatever his public chippiness and rudeness to any journalist who questions his decisions, it is most telling that his department loves him. He is loyal, funny, gossipy and hands out roses to women staff members. And not too grand to get down and party.

Those baying for his resignation seem to be doing so not because he may have transgressed ministerial codes with his Admiralty Arch assignations but out of longstanding snobbery and distaste for the only truly working-class member of the Cabinet. It never looks pretty, sex between people of less than tender years. And when one of them wears red leather trousers and is shacked up with a lorry driver there is double the chance to sneer.

But up and down the country from call centres to meat-pie plants to government departments, office affairs are getting unhappy employees through the day. By office affairs I mean not sustainable relationships — although these can be the by-product — but overblown flirtations in which, like the Prescott affair, neither party has any intention of dumping their spouse. And whoever the participants, they follow the same rules, the first being that the couple believe no one knows about their relationship even though “I’m at it with X” might as well be franked on their foreheads.

The second is that however seedy they seem to outsiders, the lovers concerned do not feel tacky. In fact, they have never felt more glamorous, as if their dreary workaday selves and imperfect bodies have been replaced by hot Hollywood actors. Their secret trysts and hurried couplings are projected in their minds as grainy film noir. The affair is an exciting sub-plot in their monotonous story line. Even borrowing a stapler generates a sexual frisson, a departmental meeting turns into a coded erotic game. For many middle-aged people, lives greyed by responsibility and marriages ossified by neglect, affairs offer their only opportunity to be intimate, affectionate, playful and silly.

Of course adultery destroys marriages, and who cannot feel for loyal, doughty Pauline, who has strived so hard for 40 years to be in every way the irreproachable political wife. But there are worse marital crimes than an office affair. Coldness, miserliness, desertion, mental cruelty, slowly over many years chipping away at a partner’s self-esteem, are all less forgivable, less fallibly human, than what happens after some dirty dancing at the Christmas bash.

• OH, MARKS & Spencer, I’m doing my best to restore your fortunes. But it ain’t easy. Last week, excited by the blue and white Chinese-style jacket worn by Erin O’Connor in every M&S advert, I marched into its “flagship” Marble Arch store.

  I searched two huge floors. No sign of my jacket. “Everyone is asking about that,” said an assistant. “It’s not in until the end of May. Distribution problems.” What is the point in spending millions driving people into a store for something that doesn’t exist, I thought, and stomped off to Zara.

  janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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