How long were the last days of Rome? By some estimates, about 200 years, so I hope you’re sitting comfortably after a week in which: a female MP was baselessly branded an exhibitionist; a male MP was accused of watching porn in the Commons chamber; it was reiterated that 56 MPs are reportedly under investigation for sexual misconduct (three of them in the cabinet); and an MP recently convicted of child sexual assault was revealed to have put in a forward-dated resignation letter, ensuring he’ll collect his full April salary. Meanwhile, the prime minister remains under police investigation over a number of allegations that he broke his own laws to attend parties. Rome-wise, we could have another few thousand weeks of this. Don’t worry – it’ll feel longer.
Still, let’s kick off with the Conservative MP accused by two of his own female colleagues of watching porn in the chamber (and also in a select committee). Tiverton’s Neil Parish has been suspended from the Tory whip, pending investigation by the Commons standards committee, so we’ll have to wait the usual unconscionably long time to discover whether what’s NSFW at your job is or isn’t SFW at his.
In place of a functional system of discipline, we have a number of fellow Conservatives offering their idiosyncratic brand of help with illuminating the story. “I can’t even get a wifi signal in the chamber!” trilled Bassetlaw MP Brendan Clarke-Smith. Defence secretary Ben Wallace linked any “poisonous” behaviour with parliament’s drinking culture, saying: “My advice to any MP is actually to avoid the bars. To finish your day’s work and go home.” I mean, for a Tory local election slogan, I quite like: “Go back to your constituencies and prepare to watch porn on the job there.” But as a national mood-capturer goes, it’s not exactly Labour Isn’t Working. Maybe Keir Starmer could go with Labour Isn’t Wanking; see if that’ll move the dial in Wandsworth.
Having said that, watching porn in the Commons obviously has nothing to do with wanking and everything to do with power. Unlike the entirely blameless Angela Rayner, men who obtrusively watch porn where they know it might make others feel uncomfortable genuinely are engaged in a form of exhibitionism. If it helps the Conservative hierarchy get a grip, maybe they should think of THIS as the gateway drug to indecent exposure.
And so to the sheer scale of Westminster’s cross-party sexual misconduct problem. Fifty-six accused MPs really is an astonishing statistic, given the arcane Westminster system’s barriers to reporting. It is certainly statistically likely that the overwhelming majority of those 56 are men, meaning that up to one in eight male MPs are currently accused of inappropriate behaviour and worse.
Women who work in Westminster are beyond fuming that this continues to happen and that nothing ever changes. One female Tory MP told Politico that things had actually got worse under Johnson because of the “culture of rule-breaking”, where nothing happens to dodgy MPs. As for the guys who can’t wait to call the current scandal a “dead cat” for whatever they deem the real issue of note, they should probably understand that for women this stuff isn’t a “dead cat”, or for the young male staffers who have also experienced unwanted and distressing advances from older male MPs.
The ever more pressing wider issue that this does feed into is the collapse of trust in the whole of politics, potentially equal to or exceeding that engendered by the MPs’ expenses scandal. Speaking of Rome – and indeed of collapse – when Edward Gibbon came to identify key factors in that empire’s decline, he cited such things as flashiness prioritised over economic growth, a widening gap between rich and poor, perverted obsessions, high taxes that were then misspent, a decay of ideals … I dunno – feels like one or two of those ring a contemporary bell.
Anyway, I’ll tell you a phrase you never hear any more: “cut-through”. Whatever happened to people honking dismissively about “cut-through”? A year ago, you couldn’t move for know-it-all allies of this administration waving around a glass of brosé while explaining that this or that would never cut though to ordinary voters – that any amount of substandard behaviour is “priced in” to the public’s support for Boris Johnson and his administration. Voters didn’t care about this or that standard in public life, we kept hearing. Industrial levels of lying in government, raging incompetence, unfitness for high office alleged by his own lieutenants, cronyism, contempt for elderly and vulnerable people, getting donors to pay for luxury holidays and interior design schemes – these moral failings didn’t matter, we were told time and again, because voters didn’t think they mattered. A form of high-concept severance had taken place, where all sorts of individuals who should have known better were quite happy to effectively assert that morality had been successfully divorced from politics.
Yet this has not in fact happened. Far from forgetting that standards in public life matter, and feeling their absence only as the occasional twinge of a phantom limb, much of the public has spent much of this year absolutely furious about what they perceive as outrageous misbehaviour in politics, which they know only too well would not be tolerated in their own workplaces or their own homes during lockdown. And this was before we got the latest explosion of sexual misconduct that could and should blow up into a proper scandal. The risk of knowing the price of everything is that you can end up forgetting about its value. Ordinary people are turning out to have longer memories.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
