Tories make political rivals in the perversion stakes look like Brownies

WHEN the publication of the memoirs of walking social-skills-bypass, the Rt Hon Liz Truss, isn’t even in the top three most dubious things members of your party have managed to achieve in a week, you know you’re in trouble.

In all honesty, I hadn’t heard of Mark Menzies, MP for Fylde, before today but then I’m not a regular on Grindr, for obvious reasons. It turns out that

I’d missed out on quite a colourful life. Back in 2014, Menzies was forced to resign as a ministerial aide following allegations made by a Brazilian rent boy. More recently, he had allegedly rang up his elderly campaign manager in the early hours of the morning saying he’d been kidnapped by “bad people” and needed £5,000 to pay them off as a matter of “life and death”.

Perhaps most damagingly in this nation of dog-lovers, it was reported that Menzies had previously been interviewed by police over claims he’d almost killed a neighbour’s dog by getting it drunk, which sounds like Jeremy Thorpe’s idea of a stag party.

Such developments are increasingly the “new normal” in the Conservative Party. They make the previous champions of British political perversion, the Lib Dems, look like a Brownie pack. It’s indicative of their current topsy-turvy morality that Tory HQ seems more exercised about legal adults having a crafty smoke than dealing with the apparently endless sleaze.

Given this moral turpitude, perhaps it was appropriate that prior to Business Questions were questions to the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Andrew Selous. Not much discussion of ethics there alas: though there were thoughtful queries on the sale of Church land in

Bedfordshire and a gloriously theatrical eruption from the pinstriped Krakatoa that is Sir Desmond Swayne. “Is it their intention to drive us into the arms of Rome?” he bellowed, on the failure of the Church of England to put out a coherent response to Stella Creasy’s “abortion up til birth” crusade. (“What’s wrong with that?” came a reply from a more Papistically inclined member.) Alas, today the role of the unfortunate person designated to be the acceptable face of modern Conservatism fell to Penny Morduant. The Leader of the House is usually full of vim, batting off Lucy Powell’s petty niggling with a stately froideur. However even a galleon like HMS Penny has her limits. Today she reminded me of the resigned sergeant major in Zulu: “by-elections Sir, thousands of them”.

Mordaunt’s lines were typically well-written, but she read them out with all the gusto of – to pick a simile at random – an inebriated Basset Hound. Even her side-swipes at the SNP’S madcap hate-crime legislation sounded limp. Still, at least she’s one Tory MP who could reasonably be described as flaccid.

Rachel Hopkins of Luton South demanded to know when the Tories would be calling a general election. With a world-weary air and quizzically raised eyebrow, the Commons Leader thanked her “for her innovative question”. There’s still months of this to go.

As the Conservative Party limps towards its rather grubby petite morte we may get a short hiatus from all the perversion.

Then again, as I suspect Ms Powell probably knows, Labour isn’t short of a skeleton or two itself.

The Leader of the House is usually full of vim. However, even a galleon like Penny has her limits