Indecision and fudging by leadership

“SIR, you are a bounder and a cad” might ignite in you images of Flashman, the bad boy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the comedian Terry Thomas with monocle, waistcoat and cigarette holder, the cunning plans of Blackadder, or even the music rendering of the song of the same name by Sir Bald Diddley & His Wig-Outs.

The terms resonate benign and ambiguous Victorian morality in which the lecher, the coward, the rogue, the scoundrel, the rotter and the adventurer might also grudgingly be the glamorous hero.

Jolly British society used the bounder and cad slang terms, often derived from the public school, as part of the class system not only to describe the person who picks your pocket while smiling at you, but also to define others as not quite a gentleman, a vulgar mannered upstart.

There is a hint also of the sneer of superiority but not quite the accusation of criminality.

Over the years the bar has been raised in public life to challenge a spectrum of behaviour which no longer has the protection of euphemistic slang and calls out the cheat and villain.

Even Boris Johnson failed to change the parliamentary lobbying rules to protect Owen Patterson from what the opposition called ‘cash for access’.

Those of us who remember the saucy scandal of the Profumo affair in the 1960s thought that it could not be improved upon (a government minister, Russian spy and model) but then we didn’t know about Ron Davies’ moment of madness on Clapham Common; David Mellor (often called the ‘Minister for Fun’) and the Spanish actress; Anthony Blunt – a knight of the realm, honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Soviet spy; Jeffrey Archer and a four-year prison sentence for perjury.

It doesn’t stop there, but the recent mess Plaid Cymru has got itself into as a result of its management of the disciplinary actions around Jonathan Edwards MP is hard to understand.

What Keir Starmer described as a culture of misogyny and harassment in Parliament will not be improved by the indecision and fudging by the party’s leadership.