You say sleazy, I say sleazy

The blue-bloods are up in arms! Tim Montgomerie's blue-and-blue army at ConservativeHome are enraged by the failure to kick Derek Conway out of the Commons and remove the whip, and their fury is only going to be enriched by the revelation that Conway may have given another 32 grand to another son from his parliamentary allowance.

Only Iain Dale among the leading Tory bloggers isn't called for Conway's head on a pike suspended over London Bridge, claiming friendship with the transgressor. He's getting kicked in the head for that in his comments, but at least he's being honest. But surely, Iain, you must be slapping your forehead at the blistering, inexplicable, arrogant idiocy of Conway's caper?

So, here we are again, and this time Davey C will have to turn his high horse in for a smaller, Shetland-sized model. Alan Johnson breathes a sigh of relief, as does El Gordo, who will now find PMQs a walk in the park compared to previous outings. We've been giving the comrades a good bitch-slap for political tonedeafness in previous weeks, but Cameron's failure to remove the whip from Conway immediately while an investigation takes place makes compulsory organ donations and McDonalds A-levels look like Wilsonian strokes of genius.

How much does all of this matter in the outside world, where voters live? Today's poll in the Indie suggests that Labour didn't suffer too badly, if at all, from the Hain episode. It's Westmonster's belief that most electors already think MPs are swindling liars, so any further transgressions are already discounted in voter's minds. It'll be interesting to see if there is a difference for voters between grabbing a few k to run an election campaign, and grabbing a few more k and lobbing it at your family. That feels like a different (more Tory?) grain of sleaze. To use our analogy from yesterday: if Alan Johnson was endangered by payments amounting to a Ford Fiesta, Conway seems to be well into Aston Martin territory.

But we at Westmonster never subscribed to the theory that sleaze brings down governments. The ERM and Norman Lamont did for John Major, not Neil Hamilton.

So, perhaps now Labour sleaze has been cancelled out by Tory sleaze, we can get on with the proper business of making laws and running the country. Unless Nick Clegg and the LibDems have secretly been taking money from Volvo in return for projecting an image of calm security, that is.

Written by Lloyd Shepherd on 29 Jan 2008 8:43 AM. Permalink