Top 50 Political Scandals: Part Two

Part Two of The Spectator’s Guide to the Top 50 Political Scandals — counting down from No. 25 to No. 1

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.

And if you missed the first part, you can catch up on the countdown from 50 to 26.

Mandelson: the one-man scandal machine

It is the greatest paradox of contemporary politics: the master of spin, the lord of the dark arts, the king of the fixers — who even managed to save the flatlining premiership of Gordon Brown last month — has also been the most scandal-prone minister of the New Labour era, a man who scarcely seems able to pop out to the shops without generating a flurry of innuendo-packed headlines. Few doubt his political genius. Peter Mandelson can spin anything, with one notable exception: himself.

So it is only proper that His Lordship gets a section all to himself in our guide to political scandals. Before Labour swept to office in 1997, Mandelson and his friends fretted that his sexuality would be an issue: in the event he was outed in October 1998 by our own Matthew Parris on Newsnight after the resignation of Ron Davies — and the nation responded with a collective shrug.

Not so two months later when it emerged that the then secretary of state for Trade and Industry had borrowed £373,000 from Brownite Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in west London.