Sleaze never a winning look, Boris
YOU’D think that after the expenses scandal they’d have learnt their lesson. But no, 12 years after being told to clean up their mess, MPs were again up to their eyeballs in sleaze this week.
On what was a dark day for democracy, they voted to rip up the Standards’ rules to save ex-cabinet minister Owen Paterson’s sorry backside – a man who didn’t just break the rules but rode a bleedin’ coach and horses through them.
And politicians wonder why people don’t trust them; why we say: “It’s one rule for them and another for us”; why we believe they don’t give a stuff about the electorate, only themselves. Why, when politicians say, “We do this to make people’s lives better,” we just laugh.
Paterson was caught bang to rights having breached Parliamentary standards by trousering £500,000 while lobbying for two companies.
But in an effort to save his neck, Tory MPs voted to change the laws that damned him rather than punish him for his wrongdoing.
And even after having been forced to resign, Paterson, who’s never shown a shred of remorse, is still playing the victim, insisting he did nothing wrong and bleating about the “cruel world of politics”. He means “bent”, surely?
Worse, after Parliament had voted to change the rules and because he thought he had Boris’s backing, he stupidly boasted he’d do exactly the same thing again.And added that all those who’d found him guilty should be sacked.What arrogance!
Yes, I see why some MPs might have had sympathy for Paterson, whose wife Rose took her life last year, he claims, because of the investigation into his lobbying.
But her tragic suicide cannot be used to excuse his wrongdoing.
And what the Hell was Boris – who dumped Paterson after the furious backlash – doing by backing him in the first place? He must surely know how this kind of sleaze plays with the electorate? How the chicanery we’ve seen this week sickens us and confirms all our worst fears about politicians?
Doesn’t he get that the voters have moral standards even if the people who govern us don’t.
What Paterson, Boris and those MPs did was to literally stick two fingers up at us all saying: “Ha ha – the rules don’t apply to us.”
Paterson abused his power to make half a million quid. Had he just taken his punishment – a 30-day suspension – and not behaved like a petulant child he’d have been back in the Commons after a month.
And he wouldn’t have dragged the Tories back into the sewer of sleaze.
Reforms to standards rules have thankfully now been scrapped but the damage to the Tories has been done. And our once great democracy – lauded as one of the cleanest in the world – has taken a kicking.
Now we’re all wondering just how embedded this sleaze, this immorality, is inside the Tory party? Is it just the tip of the iceberg?
And we’re asking: “Why should we ever again vote for a bunch of greedy chancers who’ll just ditch the rules when it suits them?” And, yes, I’m one of those people.