Top 50 Political Scandals: Part One

11 July 2009

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Part One of The Spectator’s Guide to the 50 Biggest Scandals — counting down from 50 to 26

There is one word that frightens politicians more than any other: scandal.

They know that scandal can bring about personal ruin, cut short a promising career and even bring down a government.

The power of scandal is that it imprints itself on the public mind. Some are about sex, others about money, drugs or espionage. But they are all about power: the corrupter, the ultimate aphrodisiac.

This is your guide to the scandalous world of Westminster. Read on.

50. Sex and the Palace, March 2009

You wait years for a good, old-fashioned Commons sex scandal, and then one comes along and is immediately buried by weightier political controversy.

It was 22 March 2009 when the News of the World ran its exclusive on Nigel Griffiths. The married Labour MP for Edinburgh South had ‘cavorted’ with a mystery brunette in his Commons office — on Remembrance Day, of all days — and recorded the whole thing on camera. The paper printed some of the pictures it had got its hands on, including one of a stockinged leg poking out from behind an oak-panelled door. It was all salaciously compelling stuff. But then, exactly a week later, news of Jacqui Smith’s porn-film claims broke, kicking off the MPs’ expenses scandal good and proper. Griffiths’s dalliance was relegated to a footnote in the public mind.

49. Euan Blair arrested for being drunk and incapable, 5 July 2000

‘Sixteen-year-old boy gets stupidly drunk and vomits all over Leicester Square after finishing GCSEs’ is not much of a news story.

But when the 16-year-old in question is Tony Blair’s son and the Prime Minister has just proposed marching drunks to cashpoints to pay on-the-spot fines, it is a rather different matter. Just to make things worse for the Blairs, Euan initially gave a false name, address and age when arrested by the police for being drunk and incapable. His true identity was only discovered when he was searched.

48. Don’t let the buggers get you down, 1993

Michael Mates had served in parliament since 1974 but his opposition to Mrs Thatcher (he led the revolt against the poll tax) meant he had never obtained ministerial office.

However, in 1992, John Major appointed him Minister of State at the Northern Ireland office. Mates’s ministerial career, though, was to be ended by his support for Asil Nadir.

Nadir, a Turkish-Cypriot, was the CEO of Polly Peck and a major Tory donor. The company had grown and grown in the 1980s, becoming the biggest fruit distributor in the world. Yet in 1990 it went bankrupt with debts of £1.3 billion. Facing 13 charges of theft, Nadir skipped bail and fled on 4 May 1993 to the unrecognised republic of Northern Cyprus from which he could not be extradited. Later that month, it was revealed that Mates had sent Nadir a watch bearing the inscription ‘Don’t let the buggers get you down’ after his watch had been confiscated by the authorities.

At first, Mates, with the support of the Prime Minister, seemed set to ride out the storm. But then in June a letter emerged supposedly showing that Mates had complained to the Attorney General about the handling of the Nadir case. This and a dinner that Mates held with Nadir’s PR man were the final straws and Mates resigned on 24 June.

47. A ‘back to basics’ resignation, January 1994

Tim Yeo was hardly a crucial figure in the Major government, but as a junior minister he was fair game once John Major launched his ‘back to basics’ campaign.

ON BOXING Day 1993, the Mirror broke the news that Yeo had a love child with a Conservative councillor. The child had been born nine months after the Tory conference. Yeo filled the Christmas-to-New Year political news vacuum. With his constituency association demanding some kind of sacrifice (they had never warmed to Yeo), he quit as a minister on 5 January.

46. ‘A sex act too revolting to describe’, 2004 to 2006

Oaten won his parliamentary seat in 1997 by a majority of two. But the High Court ordered a re-run of the election, which Oaten won by a massive 21,556 votes. By 2003 he was Lib Dem home affairs spokesman and tipped as a future party leader.

BUT IN January 2004, the married Oaten began seeing a 23-year-old rent boy. Oaten later claimed that he ‘was trying to fatally undermine my own political career’ because he ‘could never bring myself to resign from the front bench’. He also cited, to much derision, a ‘dramatic loss of hair’ as playing a role in the whole affair.

On 10 January 2006, Oaten declared for the Lib Dem leadership despite knowing what might be exposed about him. Nine days later he withdrew because of a lack of support. But that weekend, the News of the World approached him to say that they knew about his affair with the rent boy, his three-in-a-bed romps and his partaking in what the paper called a ‘bizarre sex act too revolting to describe’. The nature of that act produced much speculation. It must be the only time that coprophilia has been discussed in the opinion pages of the Sunday Telegraph.

Oaten resigned immediately as Lib Dem home affairs spokesman and later announced he would quit as an MP at the next election.

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