Gravity and grief for the oiler’s demise

YOU would have thought a senior member of the Royal Family had just died, such was the dolefulness at Westminster when Keith Vaz finally quit as chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee.

Across the land, corks were popping, ragged cheers broke out and the great unwashed were thinking ‘about ruddy time’. But the Establishment was aghast. Use rent boys as much as you like; if you are chairman of a parliamentary committee, your name will be polished until it gleams like a brass knob.

‘We accepted his resignation with regret,’ said Tory MP Tim Loughton, who will chair the committee temporarily. Mr Loughton (E Worthing & Shoreham) said ‘sadness’ or ‘regret’ three or four more times, his face inflated into a puffball of sombre statesmanship.

His chin dropped to his chest to convey the tragedy of it all.

Sadness? Oh come off it, Tim. Delight, relief, cackling disbelief, a frisson of scandal: such words would surely have been more truthful. You would never think that, behind the scenes, Mr Loughton is one of the most superbly scabrous gossips of London SW1. He and some other members of the committee were performing their obsequies in the atrium of Portcullis House, one of Westminster’s main concourses. Television lights burned brightly. Rubberneckers abounded. Yummy, yummy publicity! Ancient David Winnick (Lab, Walsall N and, for years, no admirer of Vaz) pushed his neck forward. Either that or Mr Loughton was being photobombed by a tortoise.

MRLoughton was soon sweating like an onion but he was not going to give up a slot on rolling news. No way! On and on he went. Great was the gravity, the grief. Lear himself, rending his garments at the death of Cordelia, would have been pressed to match such sorrow.

Mr Loughton went on about Mr Vaz’s achievements, his public service, his devotion to Parliament. Quite how he overlooked the appalling oiler’s evasions, pretensions and tawdry associations, it is impossible to say.

Some reporter on Sky News was soon intoning about the ‘ tributes’ paid by MPs to the departed Vaz. Strike up the Chopin funeral march, somebody. Muffle the church bells.

Dear oh dear. There has been, in the political firmament, a weird, shaming reluctance to see Vaz for what he is.

If he had been filmed saying anything politically incorrect he would have been shunned like a Biblical leper.

But allegations about rent boys in a druggy setting by a married Privy Counsellor in a ‘sex-flat’ bought with cash? Pish! How deplorably vulgar of the public prints to consider this untoward.

Chuka Umunna (Lab, Streatham) was standing beside Mr Loughton. Someone asked if he would be the committee’s next chairman.

Mr Umunna said, in so many words, that a funeral was no time for such careerist contemplations. But his lips twitched with the hints of a smile. Oooh, Chuka, dear, I do believe you espy an opportunity!

As for Jeremy Corbyn, he wafted aside the Vaz scandal almost as something from another world – not his concern at all.

He was more interested in appearing at a leadership-campaign event with 1980s band UB40. You may remember them: anti-Thatcher protest reggae songs, most sounding the same.

Like the Labour Party, they have had a few splits of late.

A few of the band’s members, all tweezered hairdos and pingy eyes, were on parade to support Mr Corbyn’s re-election bid.

They kept moaning that things were not as good as in the old days.

Mr Corbyn made a brief speech about the arts. Good for him. Tory leaders have been shamefully uninterested in the arts for years. But, as can happen with Lefties, they drew the wrong conclusions. Artistic excellence is often about individual talent.

Yet Mr Corbyn and his UB40 friends attacked grammars and insisted state schools should be comprehensives. When there is a vacancy in the UB40 line-up, do they not hold auditions? If selection is okay then, why not in schools?