Conservative majorities aren’t what they once were. The latest Tory to lose the whip is Fylde MP Mark Menzies, who asked his staff to send him thousands so he could pay “bad people” who had locked him up – adding it was a matter of “life and death”, as reported by the Times. It means the party that won the 2019 election with 365 seats now has just 346 MPs, taking their working majority down to 49 seats.
How these seats were lost tells its own story. Peter Bone was ejected from the party after a report concluded he had bullied and committed sexual misconduct against a member of staff. Lee Anderson was stripped of the whip after saying Islamists have “got control” of Sadiq Khan. Scott Benton’s downfall came when he offered to lobby ministers on behalf of the gambling industry.
With local elections looming – and a long, undeclared general election campaign being waged, the British public is fast losing faith in politics as a whole and politicians in particular, polling shows.
Rishi Sunak’s promised a government with “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. But sleaze is nothing new. The cigarette butt of John Major’s government was consumed by scandal. The consequences, however, are a recent development, said Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.
This is in part due to reforms introduced by the Cameron-Clegg coalition, which means MPs mired in scandal are more likely to face a recall petition, Cowley said.
“I don’t believe that MPs today are so much more badly behaved than in the past, so something else is going on. My view is that there’s a couple of things happening. The first is much greater visibility, bringing to light a number of incidents that would have been brushed over or ignored previously,” said Cowley.
