Sleazy does it

Ask any of the present Tory government who their greatest political influence was and most, I would guess, would say Margaret Thatcher. I disagreed fundamentally with most of her policies, and still do, but it is only with the events of recent times that I can look back and view certain aspects of her time in office in a different light.

She ruled the Tory Party with an iron rod but always with integrity, transparency and accountability. Any Minister deemed to have crossed any of those lines, no matter how trivially, was required, not expected, to resign. Just ask Francis Pym, Lord Carrington, Cecil Parkinson or Michael Heseltine, all decent and honest politicians, to name but a few. And her mantra was always “value for money”.

Today, however, we have a Tory administration that spent £41 billion on a useless Track and Trace system; that awarded PPE multi-million pound contracts to its friends and donors via a VIP fast track route – £2.1 billion of this cash awarded having mysteriously disappeared – with much of the PPE equipment unfit for purpose; a Prime Minister who pays for nothing whether it be holiday homes or ludicrously expensive wallpaper; a Chancellor with responsibility for taxing the mega-wealthy and multi-national companies who just happens to bea member of a mega-wealthy family who own a multi-national company, while cutting vital payments to the most needy in society; MPS who lobby for large companies and trouser hundreds of thousands of pounds for their efforts and see no problem with this; that ignores independent inquiries and court rulings that don’t happen to show its ministers in a positive light and threatens to change the laws because of it.

This is just the tip of the sleaze iceberg and, during the current climate conference, it’s one iceberg that is not receding. So is this government carrying on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy of integrity, transparency, accountability and value for money? You decide.

D MITCHELL

Edinburgh