There. Could. Never. Be. Enough. Popcorn.

Yes. I know we've heard it before, but, mining its usual vein of news-that-isn't-news, the Mail has brought up a story which has a certain fascinating potential:

Relations between Rupert Murdoch and Tony Blair have collapsed over reports of Mr Blair’s friendship with the media mogul’s ex-wife, Wendi Deng.

The paper's anonymous sources claim that Ms Deng and Mr Blair stayed overnight together at several of Murdoch's homes without his knowledge, leaving the Mail to do its best to fan the flames of back-stairs gossip into a full-blown partisan feud.

The protestations of friends and allies provide have a certain piquant interest but - and I suspect it's what the Mail journalists are secretly hoping - these may yet prove to be mere appetisers for the main event.

You see, whether or not his wife believes that he actually strayed - one assumes she knew where he was all the time (though I can't imagine that protestations of innocence carry much weight from the mouth of a consummate politician) - there must surely be a temptation to react with hostility towards any perceived interloper, however slight the incursion.

We know that Mrs Blair is a woman of strong personality and events at the Leveson enquiry suggest that Ms Deng, too, is a force to be reckoned with (and, perhaps relevantly, a newly-single woman who acquired both her husbands through extra-marital affairs).

So far, the principal actors in this drama - unlike their alleged allies - have maintained a dignified silence; should it be broken, this would surely be a conflict of epic proportions - Alien v. Predator on stilts.

And there would, it has to be said, be more than a little entertaining irony in two women, who have, in their separate ways, gained much indirect material benefit from the dubious practices of spin, PR and the media, finding their own private feud laid bare for the masses.