There is no getting away from Karl Marx’s gag about history beginning as tragedy and ending as farce. When the only thing we can think about when it comes to the Government is a mesmerising sex scandal, we really are in John Major 1997 territory.
As scandals go, this is a good one, featuring financial impropriety as well as, um, bad judgment. Last December, Mark Menzies, an MP no one has ever heard of, allegedly phoned an elderly local Tory party volunteer at 3.15am to tell her that he needed £5,000 “as a matter of life and death” because he was being locked up in a flat against his will by “bad people”. The sum, risen to £6,500, was paid by his constituency office manager by cashing in her ISA. Another paid hundreds of pounds of his savings to pick up Mr Menzies, it is claimed; most of us would happily have consigned him to his fate. Menzies denies any wrongdoing.
