Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Lord Sewel, you’ve made me proud to be British

The Lord Sewel scandal makes me feel proud to be British. For here, thanks to some glorious John Wilkes-style dirt-digging by the Sun — in your face, Leveson! — we have a proper political scandal.

This ain’t no yawn-fest about MPs claiming the cost of a Kit-Kat or accidentally favouriting a gay-porn tweet: sad little pseudo-scandals which in recent years have tainted the good name of ignominy.

No, the fall of Sewel is a full-on, drugged-up, peer-and-prostitutes scandal, of the kind Britain used to be pretty good at before the square Blairites and cautious Cameroons took over. The disgracing of Sewel is a reminder of British politics at its saucy best. Sewel, I salute you.

Like our steel industry and pop music, Britain’s ability to do scandal has been in decline. The nation which gave the world the Profumo affair — call-girls! Soviets! Orgies! — has in recent years clutched its pearls over such non-stories as Peter Mandelson getting a loan off a rich mate and Jacqui Smith’s husband spending £10 on porn films. Please. If he had starred in a porno that would be something.

The naffness of British scandal was summed up in the juxtaposition of two newspaper front pages that went viral in 2013. There was the Toronto Star, whose cover featured notorious Toronto mayor Rob Ford next to the headline, ‘I have smoked crack cocaine’. And there was the Brentwood Weekly News, whose front page had an exasperated-looking Eric Pickles next to the headline ‘I did not spend £10,000 on extra biscuits’.

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Look, no offence to my Canadian friends, but if that nation, which isn’t exactly famed for its vim, is beating you in the scandal stakes, you know you have a problem.

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