Why is lying to MPs worse than lying to the voters?

AMbeR RUDD cut her teeth as the ‘aristocracy co-ordinator’ on the 1994 Richard Curtis romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral. So she’ll be familiar with the F-word, then.

Those of you who have seen the film will no doubt remember the opening scene, which features the Hugh Grant character spitting out the ubiquitous expletive a dozen times in quick succession.

I would imagine Look back In amber came over all Hugh Grant when she realised that there wasn’t going to be a Hollywood happy ending to her starring role at the Home Office.

yes, she would be walking off into the sunset. but, no, she wouldn’t be following the yellow brick Road to No10. Instead, she’d be shuffling away ignominiously in the dead of night, with a wilting pot plant and framed pictures of her kids stuffed hastily into a cardboard box.

Her fall from grace mimicked the usual pattern — denial, defiance and, inevitably, departure, accompanied by the obligatory formal exchange of insincerity with the Prime Minister.

These death-bed letters always make me laugh, packed as they are with gritted-teeth contrition, self-justification and mutual admiration, followed by a confident assurance from the PM that the disgraced, now ex-minister can look forward to a speedy return to public life. Missing you already. I’m reminded of the leaving-do of a dear friend of mine, who had to endure a nauseating farewell speech of such gushing praise from the executive who’d just sacked him, that he could only reply:

‘If I’m so bloody brilliant, why did you fire me?’

Maybe amber thought that by roping herself to Theresa May and acting as her human shield, she would survive. In which case, she was kidding herself.

Mother Theresa doesn’t do loyalty, despite the pious, Godbothering carapace. When the whiff of scandal or incompetence looks like spilling over on to her Russell & bromley leopard-print kitten heels, she morphs into a fully paid-up member of the Self Preservation Society.

Rudd is the fourth minister forced to walk the plank in the past six months, including May’s bosom buddy and de facto deputy Damian Green, fitted-up as a nonce by the #MeToo mob.

Theresa also sacrificed her two closest advisers, Nick Thingy and Fiona Wossername, when faced with a revolt by Tory MPs after last year’s General election fiasco.

So it was always on the cards that someone would carry the can for the Windrush scandal. although this outrageous miscarriage of justice dates back years, it was Rudd’s fate to be there when the music stopped.

Maybe if she’d paid more attention to the day job, she might have escaped with her political life. Trying to run the Home Office is an eight-day-a-week commitment. at best, it’s an untameable mega-hydra, riven with rivalries and vested interests.

but in amber’s mind, it was just a stepping stone to greater things. No sooner had she got her feet under the table, than she hired an expensive polling consultant and started raising thousands of pounds for a fighting fund in anticipation of a future Tory leadership contest.

Instead of concentrating on terrorism, illegal immigration, soaring knife crime and the myriad other responsibilities which come with the office of Home Secretary, she continued to pursue her number one obsession — derailing brexit.

Rudd carried on where she left off during the referendum campaign, bad-mouthing boris Johnson at every opportunity, and plotting with arch Remoaners.

Only last week, she was using an off-the-record meeting with the boys In The bubble to argue the case for britain staying shackled to the eU, in defiance of official Government policy.

Whatever happened to collective Cabinet responsibility, pet?

She should have been devoting herself 24 hours a day to putting right the heinous, inhumane wrongs done to Commonwealth immigrants disgracefully threatened with deportation by the bovine, box-ticking bureaucracy in her own department.

If she had taken more decisive action at the outset, it might have prevented Labour and the Leftwing media prolonging the agony. you can always rely on the political class to make everything about themselves. and so it proved.

What did for her in the end was not the appalling treatment of the Windrush generation, but a parliamentary Rudd told a select committee that there were no targets for removing illegal immigrants. Shock, horreur! When this was revealed not to be the case, after civil servants leaked a confidential memo to the Guardian, the Opposition had a fit of the vapours. The Home Secretary had ‘inadvertently’ misled the Commons! Off with her head! another one bites the dust.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind. She can’t expect any sympathy from this quarter. as regular readers will know, I never thought she was up to the job.

but here’s what always enrages me when a Minister is forced to resign for misleading the Commons. Why don’t they also have to resign their seats and offer themselves for re-election?

after all, why is lying to the Commons any worse than lying to the electorate?

In Rudd’s case, she stood on a manifesto promising to take britain out of the eU, out of the Single Market and out of the Customs Union. yet ever since she was re-elected (with a tiny majority of just 346) she has worked ceaselessly to renege on that promise.

SO Have other Tory ‘rebels’ such as anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan. For that matter, the Labour Party made exactly the same manifesto commitment to a proper brexit, but they’re backpedalling, too.

It happens all the time, whichever side you’re on. What about the £9 million of taxpayers’ money spent on the pack-of-lies pamphlet distributed to every home in the country by Project Fear? at least Call Me Dave had the decency to get his coat.

Or, if you are the other way inclined, vote Leave’s ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’?

Surely, deliberately misleading the people who pay your wages and who put you into office in the first place is ten times worse than misleading your ‘honourable’ fellow MPs, most of whom have a pretty flexible relationship with the truth themselves.

Maybe now Rudd’s gone from the Home Office, and is highly unlikely to hold on to her Hastings seat at the next election, her PR spiv of a brother will make an honest woman of her, by giving her a full-time job trying to stop brexit on behalf of his rich corporate clients.

Mind you, come to think of it, ‘aristocracy co-ordinator’ is about her level. On Four Weddings, it involved rounding up a few toffs as film extras.

actually, Love, that’s pretty much what she’s doing these days, anyway: helping round up members of the House of Lords to defy the clear will of the british people . . .