It was only a couple of weeks ago when the hapless Tory MP William Wragg was exposed for exposing himself on Grindr and then being blackmailed that I made reference to Uncle Chris, the late Christopher Booker HERE. The image from Private Eye of the Court of SuperMac dressed as if for the fall of Rome, which hangs in the downstairs loo at The Old Rectory, is again in my mind. It is as if Tory MP’s get an automatic account with the gay dating app Grindr when they are elected. Again, another Private Eye joke springs to mind.
During the AIDS crisis a Government poster warned folks that if you slept with one person you effectively slept with all his partners and their partners “When you sleep with someone, how many people are you sleeping with.” Private Eye changed people for CofE Vicars as the clergy did seem to contain disproportionate numbers of promiscuous gay men. It was tasteless but today’s version would surely reference not vicars but Tory MPs.
Today’s MP in a scandal is yet another Cameron A lister, those given preferential treatment by Call Me Dave before the 2010 election because they ticked all the right metropolitan elite identity politics boxes, opposed Brexit, did not care about a small state, thought the Union Flag was for vulgar oiks, etc, etc. In other words, the sort of folks that traditional Tories or Red Wall Tories might view as complete arseholes.
This arsehole is Mark Menzies who appears to have hooked up with a complete stranger on Grindr or perhaps two, headed off to his flat, vomited and been persuaded to hand over £6,500 as a “cleaning bill.”. This he secured by phoning a 78 year old party volunteer at 3 AM in the morning saying he needed the cash transferred by her ASAP as he was being threatened by “dangerous men”. Menzies is then alleged to have reimbursed the old biddy with party funds earmarked for campaigning. And it appears that £14,000 of party funds marked for campaigning were also used to pay some of Mark’s medical bills.
Well maybe I am just an unsophisticated oik from the boonies and do not understand the sophisticated way folks live their lives in London but to me, at every level this looks rotten to the core. Tory, central office has known about this for months but only started to take action yesterday as The Times got hold of the story. So it seems as if the Tories were happy to let this corruption and sleaze fester away as long as nobody uncovered it. Menzies had already been reselected to fight the next election. Fine chap.
This is not Menzies first brush with scandal. In 2014 A Brazilian rent boy who had thrice managed to dodge being deported as an illegal went to a paper and said that Menzies had paid him for sex and getting an illegal drug. Menzies stepped down from a junior Government post and said that he would show that he was innocent “A number of these allegations are not true and I look forward to setting the record straight in due course.” Of course, absolutely no record was set straight and so one might think that the Brazilian rent boy was telling the truth, but the Tories appeared not to care so Menzies remained as an MP.
No doubt in a party transformed by Call Me Dave it would have been considered homophobic to kick Menzies into touch for the modern Conservative party cannot be seen as the nasty party.
The result of such an approach is that those who are involved in scandals just do it again and again and all these duff career politicians fast tracked by Central Office think that they can get away with anything. The rest of us look on at a Party that looks both degenerate and utterly corrupt, totally past its sell by date. Pathetic little Sunak can scream as much as he wants about how awful Labour will be in Government. I am sure he is right. But nobody cares anymore, the Tories deserve to be thrashed when we finally vote. Opposition is too good for them. Electoral oblivion is what they deserve.