IT'S funny the way the news can make us neighbours. The trouble is, this means you wake up one morning to find Neil and Christine Hamilton have moved in next door. People we have never met, and with luck never will, suddenly become familiars in our life, more insistent than family members, closer up than distant friends. Instead of peering through the twitching net curtains of old, we spy on our new neighbours through TV, radio and newspapers.

The Hamiltons fit this category with worrisome ease, carrying on as if their life were scripted by a racy novelist with too vivid an imagination. We could blame Jeffrey Archer but he can't have written this one, he is otherwise engaged.

Hamilton-watchers have been red-eyed with the strain of it all lately. Really, you wouldn't believe some of the things they have been getting up to. Neither should you believe some of what you may have read, it seems.

On Tuesday night, Neil and Christine Hamilton were celebrating - not a pretty sight, one suspects - after police dropped an investigation into allegations of serious sexual assault.

A four-month investigation by Scotland Yard into allegations by Nadine Milroy-Sloan, a 28-year-old mother-of-four, found no evidence incriminating the couple. Miss Milroy-Sloan, who waived her right to anonymity, is being sued for libel by the Hamiltons.

How bizarre, the most peculiar twist in the vaguely-unedifying tale of the Hamiltons, subtitled The Disgraced Couple. These latest allegations always seemed unlikely but the police have to investigate claims of sexual assault. Because this is a litigious tale, much relayed in the courts, the Hamiltons are considering suing the police for wrongful arrest.

The allegations of Miss Milroy-Sloan put the Hamiltons in the middle of a media circus, which is fitting because Christine Hamilton dresses as if she were auditioning to be a clown. Her husband wears sober suits and a shifty expression, awkward ring-master to Christine's histrionics.

The Hamiltons have become the nation's pantomime villains, apparently willing to cash in on their notoriety, turning themselves into "media personalities" on Have I Got News For You, while at the same time professing horror at the rottenness of it all. The dropped allegations, now proved to have been untrue, certainly were rotten - but the Hamiltons hardly helped their cause, complaining of media intrusion while turning up at the police station shadowed by the documentary-maker Louis Theroux.

The long years of disgrace have punished the Hamiltons and notoriety has pushed them into the public eye. The roots of all this go back to 1994, when the Guardian newspaper alleged that Hamilton was among Tory MPs paid to plant questions. Mohamed Al Fayed, the flamboyant owner of Harrods, said you would "rent an MP just like you could rent a London taxi".

Neil Hamilton brazened out the row and made an ill-judged crack about how he wouldn't fail to register a ginger biscuit. He was spurned by Prime Minister John Major, just as he sued the Guardian for libel. Hamilton abandoned the libel case hours before it was due to start. The sleaze row that did for Major's Government also saw the journalist Martin Bell standing as the anti-sleaze candidate in Hamilton's Tatton constituency - and sensationally winning.

In December 1999, former MP Neil Hamilton tried to clear his name by bringing a libel action against Mohamed Al Fayed, which he lost to the tune of more than £1 million, causing him to be declared bankrupt.

Then Miss Milroy-Sloan's sexual allegations once more acquainted the Hamiltons with scandal - unfairly so in this case, but sometimes with neighbours like that, you wonder if it's time to move.