Credit: Dangerous Minds / D. J. Pound

No one likes thinking of politicians as beings capable of sex, but it turns out that when you live some of the most scrutinised lives in the world, a few of your more private matters are going to go very public.

Considering some of the things we know about our heads of state, the confirmation that, yes, they engage in the same perfectly natural behaviours that the vast, vast majority of the people all over the world do isn’t such a bad thing. We already know they do deep down, no matter how repulsive they may be as people. Yet sometimes what they do can go far beyond normal behaviours and become something else entirely.

Everyone knows that if it put on a tight skirt, JFK would have fucked a tractor, but he wasn’t alone in heads of state being total horndogs. What’s more, JFK’s constant philandering wasn’t actually confirmed until a decade after his death. It was an open secret among White House staff and the press, who didn’t cover it as they thought, since it was the President’s personal life, it didn’t really matter, but when it came to Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, everyone knew exactly what was going on.

Temple, known as Lord Palmerston, served two terms as prime minister. First 1855 to 1858, then the second, beginning the year afterwards and continuing to his death in 1865. Which we’ll get to, don’t you worry. Palmerston is a fascinating presence in British politics.

He was an extremely popular prime minister of his time, which might be one of the main reasons that one of his most notorious qualities was his popularity with the ladies. Considering this was the early 1800s, this wasn’t in the polls either.

Pretty much from the moment Palmerston entered politics as a young man, he was known as a cad and a serial philanderer. Any woman who looked at him twice seemed to end up in bed with him, no one more often than Emily Lamb, Countess Cowper, who was married to the Earl of Cowper and former Prime Minister William Lamb’s little sister. The two embarked on a 30-year passionate affair that the Earl never seemed to know about. Or if he did, it seemed that he wasn’t that fussed about it.

This made Palmerston’s reputation. Carrying on with the prime minister’s sister, along with a large slice of everyone else in London’s high society, earned him the nickname ‘Lord Cupid’ from no less a source than The Times. However, there was one important person who wasn’t impressed with Palmerston’s carrying on, Queen Victoria herself. The fiercely moral Queen despised Palmerston, though that also must have partially been because they disagreed on everything else politically and socially as well.

Perhaps that changed after the Earl of Cowper passed away, however. Because after that, Palmerston and Lamb were free to marry, and marry they did. Of course, they still saw other people, but they were famous for having one of the most affectionate, supportive marriages in Whitehall at the time. Despite the fact that there’s still a longstanding rumour that Palmerston died mid-coitus, shagging one of his maids at a billiards table.

That’s almost certainly not true, but Palmerston himself would probably love it, so we can let him have this one, right?