In the house of my late uncle Christopher Booker the walls feature a number of original cartoons from the publication he co-founded, Private Eye. Yes kids… the professional celeb and media tart Ian Hislop did NOT found Private Eye. My favourite is one that is very much in my mind today amid news of the latest Tory sex scandal, one from the Profumo era of 1963, drawn by Willie Rushden.
There is another Rushden cartoon from the same year which did not appear in the Eye also on the walls. It is of Christmas at Knighton House in Durweston, Dorset, the prep school founded by my grandparents, where Chris and other young satirists had gone to spend some time in the deep snows. I often think fondly of that too. My sisters, then aged 5 and 7, attended Knighton after our mother died and hated the place and were delighted when Dad rescued them. I have rather fonder memories of it, not having had to actually go there other than on holiday in the summer.
Back to the Profumo cartoon. It shows PM Harold Macmillan dressed as if a roman Emperor lying on a sofa with courtiers feeding him and other leading Tory’s grapes. It conveyed how the Tories, after 13 years in power had become decadent, debauched and just completely out of touch with the dirty oiks, the other 99%. SuperMac was not debauched but he was out of touch, an effete toff in an era of the Beatles, when the Upper Class had lost its sparkle. So many of SuperMac’s colleagues were lazy, debauched, dishonest. Power corrupts and after 13 years folks tend to think that power has become absolute.
If this rings any bells it should, for today we have another Tory sex scandal. William Wragg is a leading Tory MP though aged only 36. He is, no sniggering at the back, a leading member of the Tory MP’s group, the Common Sense Group. His only full time jobs have been in politics so he has almost no experience of the real world in which you and I live.
Wragg hooked up with a chap on the gay sex app Grindr and sent this chap photos of himself in compromising positions and a state of undress. The chap then blackmailed Wragg into providing contact details of 12 other leading Tories, including a cabinet minister, who – one assumes were also gay whether openly – like Wragg – or not so openly. The chap, known as Charlie then contacted these 12 trying to get them to compromise themselves and it seems as if at least two were dumb enough to send their own naked photos. This looks like a honey trap and natch everyone is blaming the Russians or Chinese. I am not sure if Owen Jones has blamed Mossad and the Jews yet but it is surely only a matter of time.
What just amazes me is not the stupidity of Wragg and his fellow photo senders but just the stench of decadence and decay within the Tories at Westminster, playing away on Grindr while hatching plots to change leader yet again as the Country goes to rack and ruin and their poll standings look ever more dismal. They are a spectacle to behold.
As he considered the failing Tories after another long stint in Government in the nineties Uncle Chris used the analogy of a pond. You chuck in a large stone, it goes splash but then sinks and is forgotten. Then another and another. But at some point, the stones reach the surface and thereafter every stone thrown in is visible and not ignored. And so it is with Governments. For a while they can be forgiven policy failure and scandal but after a while it just gets too much and at that point scandals and failures really start to matter and there is no going back, no chance of electoral salvation as the stones above the surface of the pond don’t go away. We are way past that point with the Tories now.
We all look at the wretched Wragg and his silly decadent colleagues and laugh. The Tories might try to scare us with tales of how much worse Labour will be and I am sure that, like Wilson who followed the awful Tories in 1964, the Starmer regime will disappoint, screw up the economy ( even more) and accelerate Britain’s decline. I am sure Labour will serve up corrupt and silly MPs for us to laugh at. But right now we are at a point beyond caring about that.
The Tories smell and no scare stories will stop the dirty oiks from saying that enough is enough when at last we get to vote.