Today, if I worked as a cartoonist for a tabloid newspaper, I could simply hand in a hurried scrawl of heaven, where Victoria Wood now plays the piano alongside Prince on guitar and John Whittingdale’s political credibility on slap bass. But instead, I must write.

Does it matter that the torture-porn fan, free-market fundamentalist and wilful BBC wrecker John Whittingdale dated a woman who turned out to be a dominatrix and then threw her under the bus when the story threatened to go public? Not unless you entertain some outdated idea of chivalry, I suppose. Whittingdale should remember that dominatrixes are ladies too. There is nothing of the knight about him.

And does it matter that the knowing withholding of the knowledge that Whittingdale, hog-tied by events, unknowingly dated a known dominatrix may have been knowingly left unknown in order to influence Whittingdale’s attitude to press regulations? Yes.

And in the week that Whittingdale, the cheeks of his reputation blistering, has said he is “not minded” to implement the Leveson recommendations on press regulation in full, it matters doubly so. And anyone who chooses not to see that has been wilfully latex blindfolded and tied to a bedstead of betrayal by the Anne Summers Beginners’ Bondage Kit of political expediency.

But can any of us honestly say we never unknowingly dated someone we didn’t know was knowingly working as a known dominatrix, without our knowing? I know I can’t.

In a related development, on Saturday, I was supposed to host a discussion with Roger Drew, a writer on the political satire The Thick of It, about the 2012 Leveson-inspired Goolding inquiry episode. The session was one of many at a music festival in a Pontins in north Wales for which, this year, I was the e-list celebrity curator who got to chose the acts, though not the catering.

Pontins insists on providing all the dining options for in-house events themselves, even though the staff remain visibly overwhelmed by the unexpected arrival of 3,000 people not content to eat only chips for three days.

There were more kitchen utensils in operation on stage in the drone-percussion performance by Japan’s Boredoms than there were in either of the venue’s hot food outlets. It was Jesus Christ in reverse, as if a blue-coated anti-miracle worker had taken one tiny nourishing new potato and turned it into mountains of fried food that thousands of people didn’t want to eat.

That said, I think today’s entitled young festivalgoers should be grateful for what they are given. At Glastonbury, throughout the pre-designer wellies decades of the 80s and 90s, I slept in puddles, not chalets, and ate only mung gruel given away free by Hare Krishnas.

And gruel is all I will offer next time my name is attached to a residential arts festival, in order to differentiate it from those tasteful home counties boutique events, patronised by Tories and Top Gear presenters, where the cheeses are advertised in the same-sized font as the bands and the postmodern wanking. “Cypriot halloumi + Shed Seven + burlesque.”

In the days approaching The Thick of It screening I smugly congratulated myself on my precognitive programming genius. Leveson was suddenly back in the news thanks to the speculation that sex revelations about John Whittingdale had been suppressed in order to influence his decision to implement its recommendations.

The press denied this while, simultaneously and without an iota of shame, making a fuss about not being able to name a threesome celebrity who, coincidentally, held no sway over legislation concerning newspapers’ futures. The session with Roger Drew was to be charged with sudden meaning.

But, at 6pm on Saturday afternoon, 300 political satire fans in the cinema room began a slow handclap, when it became clear that, like the evening’s supposed main stage star John Cale, the episode of The Thick of It would not be appearing.

Doubtless fans of experimental music, hysteria and exaggeration have read of the weekend event’s other problems, the final turd blockage in the U-bend of its cash flow being the caught-on-CCTV vandalism of an arcade machine by a person who had gained access to the site by pretending to be a member of the Fall’s entourage.

Orange juice (the drink not the band, though they would have beatified my 80s Peel show-heavy line-up) had been wilfully and cruelly siphoned into the toy dispensing orifice of a Minions claw grabber machine, short-circuiting an entire electrical system. Pontins’ initial estimate of the damage, for which we were financially accountable, was £24,000, a figure equal to the appearance fees of over half the acts on the bill combined.

In the micro-economics of obscure music promotion the vandalism of a cloth cyclops dispenser could be the point at which your break-even point disappears over the event horizon. I had just learned of this when I was suddenly called away to fill in during the delay caused by the missing Thick of It film.

The patient writer Roger Drew, less familiar than I with hostile, bored audiences, looked at me for answers. I decided to begin the event while technicians struggled to download a workable version of the episode, making comic play of the fact that we might be about to discuss, at length, something that would not actually be seen by its intended audience. Ionesco would applaud.

Since being press-ganged five years ago into an on/off trio, to interpret John Cage’s chance composition Indeterminacy, I have cultivated an ambivalent attitude to the very notion of what constitutes a “performance”. I realised that Roger and I looking at an impotently rotating Samsung logo on a 20ft-high screen in front of 300 people was now “the show”. We improvised around it and Roger charitably transmogrified his potential and justified indignation into comedy gold. Some people said it was their event of the weekend.

Later, I asked the lady in charge what had happened. She said that an unknown whip-wielding woman in tiny black hot pants had been seen to place the Leveson-satirising disc on a desk in the production office, and wriggle around on it until it was arse-sweated into unusability.

The nipple clamp of Murdoch bites hard on the nipple of John Whittingdale’s ministerial responsibilities. Could it be that Whittingdale, like some sick torture-porn Blofeld, maintains an army of taxpayer-funded lap-dancing dominatrix sleeper agents in basements all around Berwick Street, to ball-gag dissent and dog muzzle debate about any issues that affect him, by simply bum-juicing the evidence into oblivion? Has he no shame? What must be done with him? Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart!