After Conway, heed Coulson

Here are some brute facts: the Conservative party still has fewer seats than Michael Foot won in the 1983 general election. To win an overall majority in the House of Commons, David Cameron requires a national swing of 7.1 per cent (compared to the 5.3 per cent achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1979). For all Gordon Brown’s travails, the most recent opinion polls suggest that the Tory lead is soft: a ComRes survey in Tuesday’s Independent put the Conservative party on 38 points, eight points ahead of Labour, but well short of the 45 point threshold at which an opposition can start to feel quietly confident.

It is in this context that the Derek Conway scandal must be seen by all who long for a change of government. True, the misuse of public funds by MPs to feather the domestic nest is scarcely a practice confined to the Tory party. Labour (tellingly muted about Mr Conway’s conduct) fears that whole families of subsidised skeletons may emerge from the cupboards of its own MPs in the days ahead — rightly so.

Nonetheless, the Tories would be foolish to believe that the Conway affair can be buried in a broader argument about the conduct of all MPs, the integrity of the Commons as a whole and the need to transform a gentleman’s club still governed by nods and winks into a modern organisation that commands public trust. All this is important. But there is no denying the very specific toxicity of this case to the Conservatives. There is a risk that it will do grave damage to the meticulous work Mr Cameron has undertaken in the past two years to alter perceptions of the Tories.

Labour ‘sleaze’ stories have tended to involve allegations that policy or favours were for sale (Ecclestone, Hinduja, Mittal) or that the party had become so grand and elitist that it had not bothered to follow its own rules on donations (Peter Hain, the David Abrahams case).