Why hasn’t Lord Sewer had his ermine collar felt?

The distance from Scotland Yard to Dolphin Square is 1.2 miles. On a Sunday morning, a police car with Blues and Twos blazing could be there in about 90 seconds. So why weren’t the drugs squad hammering on Lord Sewel’s door immediately after the Sun published photographs of him snorting cocaine with prostitutes?

Why did they wait until yesterday evening to search his flat? That gave him plenty of time to dispose of any incriminating evidence.

It’s not as if there were insufficient grounds for a warrant. The newspaper’s website helpfully provided video to back up its story.

The man himself resigned as Deputy Speaker of the Lords within hours of the scandal breaking. I f that’s not an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is. he’s bang to rights.

What were the Old Bill waiting for? If they had received a tip-off that a member of the public was snorting coke in a flat round the corner f rom the Yard, they’d have immediately scrambled a helicopter, a few carloads of coppers, an armed response team and a pack of sniffer dogs.

The police showed no such reluctance when it came to mounting heavy-handed dawn raids on the homes of Sun journalists falsely accused of phone hacking and ‘conspiring to commit misconduct in public office’.

Perhaps they were scouring the statute books to see if there was some obscure 13th-century law they could use to arrest the journalists who wrote the story.

Whatever their reasons, there is no excuse for the delay. A senior peer was caught on camera taking an illegal Class A drug. Possession carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. The video also appears to show him supplying cocaine to the two hookers involved.

On one level, this exposé has added hugely to the gaiety of the nation. It was a classic, old-fashioned Fleet Street sting, as if the News of the World were still with us and the Leveson Inquiry had never happened.

WHO could fail to be amused by the photos of a portly, balding, 69-year-old politician in an orange bra and sprawled naked on a bed with a pair of low-rent whores? Two hundred quid a night is never going to buy you a top-ofthe-range courtesan these days. Lord Sewer even seems to have understated his income in a bid to keep the price down.

The joy of such stories is always in the detail, such as the fact that he paid one of the women with a cheque. Who pays a prostitute by cheque? It was probably post-dated until the next instalment of his £87,000 parliamentary salary was paid into the bank.

And what sort of self-respecting brass accepts a cheque? If Sewer had any sense he might have smelled a rat when she didn’t insist on cash in hand. Then again, he was off his face on Colombian marching powder at the time.

But the call girls are just the icing on the coke, a hugely entertaining sideshow. The most valuable service this kind of sting provides is in granting the rest of us a peek into the way so many politicians see themselves.

It’s not simply the fact that someone like Sewer can delude himself that he’s a love god, living life in the fast lane. It’s that so many people in high places think the usual rules don’t apply to them.

his grossly inflated sense of selfworth and entitlement i s also exposed, as is his sneering contempt for other politicians from the Prime Minister downwards.

All of this is enhanced by the fact that, hilariously, Sewer was the man in charge of enforcing standards of behaviour in the Lords, a position he has now been forced to forfeit.

Yet although he has stood down as Deputy Speaker and is taking a ‘leave of absence’ from the Lords, he is refusing to resign his seat — which was his reward for being one of Tony’s Cronies during the New Labour years.

While he has been suspended by the Labour Party and can, theoretically, be kicked out of the Lords under new rules introduced this month, nothing is likely to happen until the police investigation is concluded.

Why the hell not? What’s to investigate? It’s all there on video and Sewer has effectively admitted his guilt.

And even though both the police and the Lords are now investigating, this grubby affair could still lumber on for months.

The Sewer scandal also lifts the lid on the over-stuffed sinecure which is the house of Lords and the amount of money we are still shovelling into the pockets of non- entities and political placemen.

Until Sunday, most people (me i ncluded) had never heard of John Buttifant Sewel, who sounds like a character from a Victorian comic opera.

He’S an obscure academic who helped Blair i ntroduce Scottish devolution (how’s that working out, then?) and rose to become Deputy Speaker of the Upper house. his ascent without trace seems to have convinced him that he’s invincible. As an academic, you might have expected him to be familiar with Greek mythology, in particular the story of Icarus.

The media coverage has also been entirely predictable. Until Sewer stepped down as Deputy Speaker, the BBC didn’t touch the story and the Guardian and Independent relegated it to a few hundred words on inside pages, while taking care not to criticise him f or using ‘sex workers’.

If he’d been a Conservative, rather than Labour, peer they’d have been all over it.

Tory sleaze! Tory sleaze! Tory sleaze!

Unless he can be shamed into resigning his seat, this one could run and run, dragging Parliament even further into disrepute.

If he had a shred of decency, he would crawl away under a stone and disappear for ever from public life.

Now that the police have got round to searching his flat, it’s time the ‘noble’ Lord Sewer had his ermine collar felt.