Did McCain have affair with P.J’s wife?

A highly unsubstantiated rumour is buzzing around cyberspace that the Republican presidential candidate John McCain once had an affair with Amy Lumet (pictured), the Californian socialite daughter of film-maker Sidney Lumet (and grand-daughter of chanteuse Lena Horne), but more importantly the ex-wife of the writer P J O'Rourke.

The relationship, so the story goes, was conducted during the first Gulf War in 1990-91 when O'Rourke, who as reported here this week is suffering from colon cancer, was on assignment in the Middle East. He and Lumet had been living together for more than two years and decided to marry – he was 43 and she 26 – before he left for the Gulf, because if he died covering the war, it “would make everything simpler.... It seemed much simpler to be a widow than a girl with a dead boyfriend."

In 1991, Lumet is said to have started working for McCain in an unspecified capacity – and that’s when the affair allegedly happened.

Bloggers cite as supporting evidence a larky piece about McCain O'Rourke penned recently for the Weekly Standard, the American neo-con magazine. He wrote: "Supposedly the ‘women's vote’ is . . . well, let's not go too far with this. I can speak to John's honour, duty, valour, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was."