Caught In A Trap
Who would you ring if, at half past three in the morning, you found yourself locked in a flat by ‘bad people’ who were demanding five thousand pounds for your release? Your mum, maybe? Or your partner? Or a trusted friend of many years? Or would you - if you found yourself in such a spot of utterly baffling peril - ring a 78-year-old former employee?
In the greater scheme of things, Mark Menzies’s plight isn’t that big of a deal. Britain has a long, proud history of returning to Parliament eccentrics with rackety private lives. And unlike, say, Jeremy Thorpe or John Profumo, Mark Menzies is an MP of vanishingly little importance. He held neither power nor office at the time of his early morning imprisonment. He held only the whip. And that is gone now too.
But no man is an island and Mark Menzies is not, of course, that atypical. He is a Tory MP from Lancashire. One of his neighbouring MPs, Scott Benton, was forced to resign his seat after being filmed boasting of his corruptibility and offering to leak confidential documents for the commercial benefit of a fictitious gambling company. Another of Menzies’s neighbours, Paul Maynard, is currently under investigation for the alleged misuse of parliamentary funding for political activities.
We have had, in this Parliament, multiple accusations of sexual assault and misbehaviour against serving MPs; an MP who had to resign for watching pornography in the chamber; cabinet members forced to resign over bullying; an MP who repeatedly exposed himself to his staff; an MP found to have lobbied colleagues for money - the thing about this list is that it isn’t even attempting to be exhaustive.
Why? The easy answer is that it was ever thus. Maybe we are just better at uncovering misbehaviour and a lot less tolerant of it when we see it. There is something to this and it is a sign of progress - particularly when it comes to the treatment of MPs’ staff.
But part of the problem is also, surely, how unattractive we have made the business of politics to all but the saintliest and the most sinful. The saintly still enter politics because they feel a duty to do so - on all sides of the House there are MPs whose ambitions are for their community and their country and who feel obliged to offer themselves to the service of those ambitions. But the sinners enter politics because the sleaze is the point. They put up with the long hours and ritual humiliations of our political system because they want to feel important, be gifted hospitality, enjoy attention and want to wield power over other people.
Of course, a saint can become a sinner, and vice versa one hopes, and most people are somewhere in between. But if we get the politicians we deserve then we must all take some responsibility for the fact that a lot of the politicians we have got are grubby people.
Will a Labour landslide resolve this issue? Will we have a parliament of saints? It is unlikely. 200 new MPs means - on the law of this parliament’s averages - a good forty or so absolute wrong-uns. And the Labour due diligence and vetting operation has itself been found wanting - there is a reason they did not have an official candidate in Rochdale, after all. What is needed is not just a change of personnel but a change of the structures and incentives that we underpin our political system with. We need being an MP to be a good and rewarding role (and no, this is not just about the pay) if we want good people to seek election.
We will always have some bad MPs. But we will have more and more of them if we continue to make being an MP such a dismal and dispiriting occupation.