Scharping fights on after more amorous revelations

Germany's besotted Defence Minister was grilled by a parliamentary committee yesterday over conjugal visits to his girlfriend at the taxpayer's expense, but he insisted he had done nothing wrong and again defied calls to resign.

Rudolf Scharping, nicknamed Randy Rudi in the tabloid press, had been summoned to explain why he had allegedly flown 50 times on the government jet in the past 12 months to Frankfurt, the city where his companion, Countess Kristina Pilati, lives.

Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor who has lost seven members of his Cabinet in his three years in office, said Mr Scharping still enjoyed his backing. "The minister has explained that all the flights were work-related," he said.

Mr Scharping's love life has been the talk of Germany for more than two weeks, after photographs of his post-marital bliss with the countess in a Majorca swimming pool were shown on the cover of a gossip magazine. The picturesappeared just as he was ordering hundreds of German soldiers into Macedonia.

The national hilarity over the affairs of a statesman viewed as among the dullest turned serious with the news that he was spending most of his time in the pool even as he was supposedly preparing the Macedonia mission. Shortly after the tense parliamentary vote authorising the deployment, Mr Scharping was back in Majorca – by way of Skopje – leaving opposition politicians stranded in the Balkans without a plane.

This is not the first time Mr Scharping has been the butt of jokes. His brief career as leader of the Social Democrat party came to a sudden end in 1995, when he fell victim to a coup he never saw coming.

To lose another minister would be unfortunate for Mr Schröder's government but, if further revelations emerge, the German Chancellormay have no other choice.