ARE THEY mad? Have they lost all sense of reality and of the decent and honourable? Even all sense of survival and self-protection? At times it seems that politicians – intelligent, senior, experienced political survivors, even ministers and ex-ministers – show such bewildering lack of cop-on it is difficult to understand how they were ever elected in the first place.
In a hole, a deep putrid hole of public contempt, even hatred, they keep on digging. Is it greed? A hubris born of too many years in power?
A culture, until recently at least, of total impunity? It seems to be all of the above.
Having just experienced a year when the British political class got such a seismic drubbing over expenses that its reputation sank to a new nadir, the idea that a former cabinet minister would be caught on camera offering his lobbying services, "like a sort of cab for hire" at £3,000-£5,000 a day, might be worthy of the most off-the-wall moment from TV satire's The Thick of It.
But truth is stranger than fiction. Stephen Byers, a former transport minister and star of the Blair years, is no fictional character but an MP preparing for a lucrative post-retirement career. And his claims to a Channel 4/ Sunday Timesteam posing as a prospective employer that his persuasive skills and insider access had already reshaped ministerial decisions on behalf of two clients were spellbinding. His desperate retraction a day later was pathetic.
Former defence secretary Geoff Hoon and former health secretary Patricia Hewitt, also once senior New Labour figures, have now also lost the Labour whip and face an ethics inquiry for similar touting for business, despite protestations they did nothing wrong. The horrified, furious response of their colleagues is almost unprintable.
Tories are anxious to draw attention away from their own recent sleaze scandal, the “non-dom” tax status of Michael Ashcroft, billionaire party deputy chairman with extensive interests in Belize. Party leader David Cameron says the affair has left voters thinking that all politicians are “just sleazy pigs out for gain”. And he is right.
As they did over the expenses scandal when the public took the view that all politicians were equally culpable, the voters are quite likely to say simply “a curse on all your houses”. He has demanded an immediate inquiry and a long-overdue mandatory register of lobbyists, now backed by Labour. British politics has inflicted yet another deep wound on itself.