Like most people in the West, I'm a great admirer of North Korea. It's really pretty hard to beat for comedy.

The latest jape involves a rumour that, when Bill Clinton visited the leading loonocracy a few months ago, the chap he thought was President Kim Jong-il was actually a fake. The real Kim was either dead or convalescing in front of the telly.

What does seem reasonably certain, in this land of whispers and walking trees (or is that Lord of the Rings?, I always get these two mixed up), is that Mr Kim had a stroke in August 2008. However, by a stroke of luck, they found another bloke who looked like him and so they bunged him into the presidential bunker to meet Bill.

A Japanese professor called Toshimitsu Shigemura (trans: Arthur Blenkinsop), says this has actually been going on since 2003. He believes that's when the real Kim died, and that everything since has been make-believe. According to Prof Tosh, one impersonator told a Japanese visitor: “I am a double.” Of course, given the shortage of drink in the joint, he might have been mistranslated, having begged the Japanese visitor: “Mine's a double.”

You have to bear in mind, too, that the culture of secrecy in these loony bins leads to fevered speculation and the spreading of amusing porkies by irresponsible elements. Remember when Gervaise Breshnev was stravaigin' aboot in yon Russia? Or supposedly stravaigin'. The rumour was that he'd handed in his dinner pail as well, and was waiting in some hellish long queue to get into Communist Heaven (where they'd doubtless run out of harps again). So, as with Kim, they'd found somebody who looked like him and made him talk the talk (no one could match Breshnev's eyebrows though; they had to Velcro two ferrets to the poor stand-in's coupon).

I hope Kim isn't deid. He's a right laugh, with his threats to destroy the world and whatnot. And he's so wee. If I were ever to meet him, say in my part-time job as janitor at the UN, I just couldn't resist tousling his hair and pinching his chubby little cheeks. I'd say: “World leader, my eye! You're far too little for that sort of thing!” How we'd laugh. Or, at least, I would.

I have seen Bill Clinton, in the flesh, as it were, though I did not have any kind of relations with him, no siree, Bob. Hell's bells, some of you have minds like sewers.

I also saw Monica Lewinsky in the fleshiness. She was doing a book-signing in Waterstone's, in Edinburgh. As the hack pack were pressed back and she got into a lift, I whispered something to a colleague that I wished I'd had the courage to say out loud. It involved a question about the direction of the lift. Work it out for yourself.

I saw Bill in Belfast and Dublin, and must say I'd no inclination to pat him on the head or pinch his cheeks. He's a big operator, and I imagine that, if the North Koreans had pulled a fast one in Pyongyang (the Korean capital, named after the sound the elastic band makes when they test another nuclear missile), he'd be mighty brassed off.

However, many experts believe it unlikely that any double could have kept gabbing for 75 minutes during the “exhaustive” private discussions. The game would surely have been up when, as an ordinary citizen starved of life's luxuries, he leaned forward to Bill and whispered: “I don't suppose you've a wee dram about your person?”