John Key has had a vasectomy

Isn’t the reaction a bit weird? The guy makes a joke and next minute:

more than 100 newspapers around the world ran stories covering his “snip” quip.

For example, the Daily Mail (of course) ran the story under the stupidity-on-stilts heading:

New Zealand prime minister forced to admit: ‘I've had the snip’

Forced? Forced? FFS, it was a joke. As Stuff reported it:

Answering questions about changes to early childhood education funding during his regular Monday post-Cabinet presser, Mr Key was asked if he would send his children to a centre where 80 percent of staff were qualified teachers or 100 percent.

“I think if I sent my 15-year-old or 17-year-old to early childhood at the moment they'd have a meltdown,” he quipped.

But what if his wife Bronagh had another?

“I’d be extremely worried because I’ve had a vasectomy.”

In the face of the stunned hacks, he said; “It’s probably too much information for the purposes of a press conference but anyway.”

And while the reporters got themselves together: “Boy that’s slowed things down. Any other questions?”

Now that is a relaxed man cracking several jokes. It was funny, and it shows why people like him so much, but I cannot understand why it was even reported. In England where people are uptight, perhaps, but in New Zealand? Maybe the journalists are still amazed that they live now on the Key D’Orsay not in Helengrad.

Or maybe the hacks here and overseas are amazed that a married man of 48 admits to having a sex life. Listen up: married couples have sex, often with each other. As George Bernard Shaw observed:

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

In this week’s Spectator, the excellent Philip Hensher, reviewing Ferdinand Mount’s Full Circle: how the classical world came back to us, reminds us that:

Many early thinkers believed, like Augustine, that marital relations were a matter of ‘descending with a certain sadness’ to the act.

See, we have made progress.