Why did my old friend Patrick Mercer fall for a sleaze sting? I’m pretty sure I know

It’s sleaze time again in Westminster. A few good stings by the broadcasters and the press and we see his lordship ‘Nuclear’ Jack Cunningham coining it by asking for £12,000 per month to make use of his extensive contacts and also his ability to get a table on the terrace of the Lords. £12,000 a month! His dad, Alderman Andrew Cunningham, did three years in chokey for his role in the Poulson affair, back in the 1970s. Two other members of the Upper House were filmed similarly grasping at the loot on offer from the Sunday Times.

And then there’s Patrick Mercer MP, who has resigned the government whip and will not be standing again in Newark. He tabled questions about Fiji being readmitted to the Commonwealth without having revealed that he was being paid to ask these questions, it would seem. It’s always fun watching the surreptitious film of these characters, torn between greed and the worry of being found out. Although not being torn very much in any of the above cases.

Patrick Mercer was late declaring the payments he received from a fictitious lobbying company, although not very late. And so I’d better get my own declaration of interest in sharpish: I know and like Mercer and he once gave me a rather nice line-drawing of a hare, as a wedding present. (As it happens, I also quite like Jack Cunningham, though he has never given me a line drawing of a hare or of anything else.) Anyway, I’ve always had a soft spot for these disgruntled right-wing Tories, because they dislike the government even more than I do.

But my association with Patrick goes back to my days as editor of the Today programme, when I employed him as our defence correspondent, a role he performed with a more comprehensive knowledge of the subject than most defence hacks, having been colonel of the Sherwood Foresters.