Pigs may fly, Hell may freeze over, and a month may pass without a Conservative MP revealing the moral decay at the core of the party. Yesterday, former MP Imran Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. In Westminster, meanwhile, rumours circulated that a senior MP had sexually assaulted colleagues. Yet another member was bailed after being arrested in a rape investigation.
These stories shouldn’t be confused with the unnamed Conservative MP who was arrested over rape allegations in 2020 before the investigation was dropped or the former government whip Charlie Elphicke who was jailed for sexual assault in 2020. Neither should they be mistaken for that of the former minister Andrew Griffiths who was found by a family court judge to have raped his wife.
They also shouldn’t be confused with the three cabinet ministers who have been reported to a parliamentary watchdog for sexual misconduct or the rotating cast of MPs suspended for sexual harrassment. Add to that the rumours flying about MPs “licking the faces of male researchers”, sending explicit photographs to female colleagues, having sex in their offices, or sleeping with prostitutes. This is to say nothing of the MPs who have come out to defend their colleagues, or who continue to cover for them rather than do their part to remove them from Parliament.
We don’t expect our politicians to be paragons. We don’t expect them to be without flaws. Anyone who believed that MPs from any party would go above and beyond to uphold family values or Abrahamic morality was fooling themselves; the briefest look at politicians around the world would hint that public statements and private life rarely coincide, and the Tories in particular hold the dubious distinction of having an MP die in office through autoerotic asphyxiation.
What is not unreasonable is to ask that the people who govern our country avoid criminality, and behave with the sort of professionalism most of us manage at work on a daily basis. For the Conservative party as currently constituted, even this standard is unattainably high.
For the same sorts of allegations to surface again and again speaks to something fundamentally rotten at the party’s core.
One MP facing accusations of misconduct would be unfortunate; two would suggest poor judgement; three, a fundamental flaw in the selection process. It doesn’t matter whether things have always been this way and the facts are simply coming to light with changed attitudes: for the same sorts of allegations to surface again, and again, and again speaks to something fundamentally rotten at the party’s core.
It should not be impossible for the party to find 600-odd candidates who meet the minimum criteria of being reasonably smart, broadly conservative in outlook, and unlikely to sexually assault their colleagues if elected.
Politicians go through multiple rounds of filtering in order just to stand; we expect scrutiny of their lives and characters to weed out people who are unsuitable. That a party can fail so badly at this without being wiped off the electoral map suggests a deeper problem.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Conservative party is not uniquely bad; the same rot afflicts each party in equal proportion. Why exactly would voters turn out and prop these parties up?
Sure, its better for the right to beat the left. But why is there no competition from the right? A party with the same policies but without the sleaze would surely attract votes. It just wouldn’t attract enough.
Advocates of first past the post as an electoral system point to its ability to block out extremists; in order to win seats, you need geographically concentrated support, which they lack. And when they do stand, the incentive for voters on the left and right to lend their support to a single party with the best chance of winning keeps them out of office.
New parties find it incredibly hard to get a foothold, let alone displace one of the major parties. In turn, those parties – shielded from electoral challenge – can start to drift from the interests of voters, guided by the preoccupations of the fraction of the population sufficiently interested in politics to pay for membership. Narrow selectorates with candidates approved by the party machine can perpetuate deeply unhealthy cultures.
The difficulty involved in displacing them – finding a party for the electorate to vote on – keeps the system stable. It also means that two parties, rotten to the core, can prop each other up; survival at the ballot box can result from voter disinterest and disgust as well as from good policies and strong leadership.
In this state, the first party to get its affairs even slightly in order can win a crushing majority; the ‘Tory sleaze’ of the 90s ended with Blair’s landslide majority, and 13 years of exile for the Conservatives. It’s no wonder that some Tories are hoping to lose the next election in order to win in the longer term; the longer the rot festers, the longer the healing process.
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