Guilty pleasures come in many forms. Big Brother. Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger. Scouring the aisles of supermarkets for ‘Whoops’ buys.

None of these, however, surreptitiously fill the heart with glee like The Curious Case of Christine Hemming vs Kitten.

For the uninitiated, this saw Christine, the wife of John Hemming, Lib-Dem MP for Yardley, found guilty of burglary of Beauty: Beauty was the name of the cat belonging to John’s lover.

It’s one of those stories that put everyone concerned in a murky light. Christine, in particular, has garnered some sympathy but almost zero credibility.

But, having witnessed an unprecedented media love-in over the last few days, I began to wonder. What if Christine was Foxy like Knoxy?

Newspapers have always been drawn to reconfiguring a news story if there’s a beauty involved (unless it’s the love-triangled cat belonging to John’s lover, obviously).

Take the generally criticised Dale Farm traveller residents, who surprisingly secured fleetingly favourable front-page news coverage this summer.

How? Because picture editors found a saucy pic of two teenaged, midriff-flaunting girls celebrating a failed eviction. Ponder why last weekend’s heatwave has never been illustrated in the media by a bare-chested bloke of advanced years, plentiful of belly, messily devouring a 99.

Note that good A-Level results are only ever achieved by leaping, willowy blondes (often, inexplicably, twins).

Clearly, I’m not about to equate the acquittal for a brutal murder with a conviction for kitten theft.

However, the excitable response for Amanda Knox’s freedom is the one of the clearest examples of blanket media interest being fuelled by a protagonist’s prettiness.

But with Amanda, this fascination with ‘beauty’ reaches a new level. From the moment the case hit the headlines five years ago, media trawled through flesh-baring Facebook pics of the accused – symptomatic of the modern media phenomenon of using social media to source revealing photos meant just for friends.

Salacious tales of Amanda’s sex life were lasciviously retold across gossip columns and in feature supplements. She was even reduced to a nickname explicitly detailing what she offered to the media fraternity – hello ‘Foxy Knoxy’.

(Actually, as an aside, if Amanda actually finds it harder than expected to secure lucrative deals post-incarceration, I’d like to suggest she’d make an excellent replacement for the creepy vulpine star of the Foxy Bingo campaign.)

The sad death of Meredith Kercher is unfortunately exactly the kind of story that excites both the media and public: reportedly, a sex crime and mystery cocktail guzzled down by all.

But I really wonder if the one thing that’s driving the story into an international sensation is because Knox is apparently a fox, a femme fatale for the 21st Century.

Certainly that was the case with Anna Chapman, who garnered a wealth of international news coverage (and a shoot with a leading lads’ mag ) for her involvement in espionage. Way to go, you very attractive threat to national security!

By means of a comparison, The Guardian and Independent ran stories last week about a proposed deportation of a spy. Coverage elsewhere hasn’t reached anyway near the levels of the Anna Chapman story.

One could argue that this is due to the spy in question, Katia Zatuliveter, not being quite as ‘photogenic’ as Anna (though this didn’t stop one other newspaper running the story with a pic they’d found of Katia in a bikini. Evidently standard uniform for Russian spies).

Interestingly, having heads turned by a pretty female face isn’t simply the domain of the tabloids, as you might imagine. Only last week, a national broadsheet wrote a profile of Louise Mensch, the fast-rising Tory backbencher MP.

The general gist of the piece was ‘If you’re a liberal, is it alright to like Louise Mensch ‘coz she’s a bit fit?’

It was almost a convincing argument, though let down by most of the last page of the article being devoted to discussing whether or not Louise had had cosmetic surgery.

I guess it all comes down to the old ‘Are newspapers being sexist or sexy?’ argument. And, more importantly, are they simply giving the public (or rather, the heterosexual male majority that buy newspapers) what they want?

It’s difficult to say: I would argue that it’s pleasing that newspaper’s business sections no longer habitually feature tenuously linked pics of lingeried women (‘…the nuclear energy business saw revenues fail to meet market expectations last quarter. Right: Sami, 21, in bra, pants and protective visor’).

There are increased sightings of well regarded, media friendly females such as Karren Brady or Hilary Devey in the business pages (though the continued lack of female representation at board level doesn’t help matters here).

And perhaps female sportswomen are given better credit than before, though the recent appointment of a female chief executive to Mansfield Town FC attracted predictable headlines (‘The beautiful game: Meet the football boss with the Footballers’ Wives looks’).

Elsewhere in our newspapers though, have perceptions of women really moved from the established stunna/harridan pigeonholes?

I go back to poor Christine Hemming, her hands-and-knees scuttle across the floor captured by an unforgiving CCTV.

Maybe she would face a brighter future after her sentence if the media thought she was pretty enough? Where are her movie offers, eh? Why isn’t she nicknamed ‘Pristine Christine’?