NEWS & INSIGHTS

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.