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The Edinburgh Festival has boasted many strange trends in its time, but one of the most disturbing is that of Tory MPs trying to resurrect their public profile. Recent years have seen Gyles Brandreth donning fishnets and suspenders for a show called ‘Zipp! – 100 Musicals in 90 minutes’, while in 2000 Doris Karloff herself (Ann Widdecombe) arrived at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to read from her novel ‘The Clematis Tree.’ Aware that there would be demonstrations against her, I went to the Spiegeltent for her reading, but did not realise how dramatic events would turn out to be. Not only did demonstrators try (unsuccessfully) to drown out the reading: they started bashing on the wooden mirrored walls of the ‘tent’, which began to shake ominously, flinging reflections everywhere, so it felt for a brief moment as if we were having an unpleasant collective hallucination starring Widdecombe as the Queen of the Night. Feature continues

This year it’s the turn of Neil and Christine Hamilton to become the true-blue terrors of Edinburgh. The show’s called ‘Lunch With The Hamiltons’ and it involves Perrier Jouet champagne – awarded to anyone who manages to tickle the Hamiltons’ fancy; Neil’s lunchbox; and, when I saw it, a banana game which resulted in at least one girl getting her face alarmingly close to aforesaid lunchbox. So if you want to start your afternoon with lashings of innuendo, and you think your stomach can survive the sight of Neil Hamilton popping open a bottle of champagne in deliberately ejaculatory fashion, then this is the show for you. Equally, if you want to lose weight and have a sensitive disposition, then this is a sure way to lose your appetite for a few hours.

Because the lunch is essentially a chat show, a large percentage of its entertainment value inevitably depends on the guests. I was lucky enough to hit a classic. It began with Cuban dancers from the super-sexy show ‘Havana Rumba’, so we in turn were treated to the spectacle of Neil and Christine being given a lesson in pelvic thrusting. At one point Neil undid his bow-tie and strung it flirtatiously around Christine. Was this a terrifying echo of Tory conferences past?

Then the chat started. The first two guests up for sacrifice on the Hamiltons’ egos were Lizzie Roper, whose show is called Peccadillo Circus, and Carey Marx, a comedian with a wit faster than the Hamiltons’e eye for opportunity. Roper fondly remembered an interview she had conducted with Christine a few years ago. In it, la Hamilton had recounted taking revenge on a member of the Tory party who had squirted a fire-extinguisher on her dress by later serving him chocolate mousse heavily dosed with laxative.

Both Roper and Marx coped well, but the true star of the lunch proved to be Ken Campbell. Watching Christine handle him was rather like watching a society hostess trying to cope when an unexpected rhinoceros arrives at her soirée. The legendary improviser and comedian bamboozled her from the off. He started by deliberately describing his show ‘In Pursuit of Cardenio’ – a tongue-in-cheek improvement on Shakespeare’s lost play – in the most arcane terms possible. Christine’s darting eyes patronisingly signalled ‘We’ve got a right eccentric here’. Campbell persisted, undeterred.

The next thing we knew, he had launched into a monologue on ‘gastromancy’ – which is a complex discipline, but, for the purposes of Campbell's game, essentially combines mysticism with farting. To demonstrate, Campbell marched across the floor, sticking his bottom out, and citing Hieronymus Bosch. Completely lost, Christine tried to upstage him with Tory-wife put-downs. It was glorious – a shining example of the incorrigible in pursuit of the intolerable. To my mind it has to prove to be one of the classic moments of Edinburgh 2006.