Here's one to conjure with. Christine Wheatley has just been dropped from the Labour Party's shortlist of candidates for Copeland, Cumbria after she revealed a colourful past as a Paris hooker. But immediately before that she says she'd been working for IBM.

"I had just finished working for IBM in Brussels and wanted to take a working holiday in Europe", she tells today's Telegraph, "and this seemed like the perfect thing to do."

This? Yes, that. "It was great fun and it was accepted practice" (for IBM alumni in 1978? Certainly sounds more interesting than the more recent practice of going back as a consultant for double the money). "I was 28 at the time. I would work in the Boulevard St Michel, it was very romantic."

There - and you'd been thinking it was called Big Blue because of the logo. ®