THE Sven story has had the nation transfixed this week, and quite rightly so.

The Daily Mail suggested yesterday that it was "a scandal third only to the Abdication and Profumo", which may be going a bit far. But you can always tell when a subject has caught the imagination by the number of radio phone-in debates about it. And because radio, and television, thinks itself rather superior to grubby old newspapers, it always gives its debates grand, portentous titles.

They ask: Do we expect too much of our celebrities? Is there any right to privacy any more? Have we lost all respect for those in authority?

Newspaperpeople go on these phone-ins to defend themselves. Sven, they say, portrayed himself as a man of integrity but has been caught two-timing. He is a man who courts publicity and exposure in order to line his own bank account - he uses his status as England football manager to sell classical music CDs and suits - and so must accept publicity and exposure when he does something the public are genuinely intrigued by.

The newspaperpeople should also say that the Sven and Ulrika coupling is gossip. Great gossip. And there is not a single person in this country that doesn't like a gossip.

There is not a single person who has never twitched the curtains and noticed a strange car parked outside next door, there is not a single person who has never taken an in-depth interest in the neighbours' peculiar goings-on, there is not a single person who has never sat in judgement on the love lives of their workmates.

There has been some lament this week that St George's Day, our national day, passed unnoticed with nary a flag flying.

Appropriately, though, our jaws were waging. The country was engaged in its national pastime - at which it is truly world class, unlike football. We are not, and never have been, a nation of shopkeepers. But we are, and always will be, a nation of gossips.

GOSSIP is a great word. It is regarded as derogatory today, but 1,000 years ago there was no greater compliment. A gossip was a person such as a godmother who was invited by parents to attend a baptism, or it was a female friend who was invited by a mother to attend a birth. But a gossip also had a tendency to use her privileged closeness to relay intimate titbits to the outside world and so a gossip has been regarded as someone not to be trusted.

JEAN-MARIE Le Pen's hero is Joan of Arc. Next week, the climax of his presidential campaign will be to have a Joan in armour riding through Paris. To him, she is the saviour of the nation.

She was no such thing and, rather like he, she was something of a madwoman. Undoubtedly brave and courageous, at the age of 13 she started hearing voices. These drove her to join the French fighting the English. She was inspirational during the 1429 siege of Orlans but in 1430 was captured by renegade French soldiers who sold her to the English for 10,000 gold crowns.

During her trial she fell seriously ill. She would have died but for the treatment of her English doctors. She was burnt alive at the stake in 1431 and the Duke of Warwick explained why Henry VI had sent his doctors to save her. He said: "The King had paid too much for her to be deprived of the pleasure of seeing her burn."