The George Osborne saga is a great news story that probably won’t go away until Osborne gives a full and frank interview or falls on his sword, but the story is not actually the story, for me at least. The public-facing story is the portrait of the British political system that this provides: shadow front benchers sucking up to oligarchs, their best mates mostly being millionaires, the new Business Secretary hanging out in the same company (shorn of his Militant-style moustache and any socialist principles long ago), the chief Tory fundraiser being an old Oxford chum of David Cameron and 99% of those involved in the world of Westminster either having their nose in the trough (admittedly often on behalf of ‘the party’) or trying to press their snout in amongst those already feeding. Not one of them can answer a straight question with a straight answer. This is a world so far removed from the man or woman on the street that it is little wonder that election turnouts are so low.

Growing up in Margate, Kent as a working class boy I saw sleaze as the way that politics ran. The local MP, William Rees-Davies, was known among his constituents as The One-Armed Bandit, which was a delightful conflation of the fact that he did, in fact, have one arm, was representing a seaside constituency where the slot machine was king and was rumoured to like the odd backhander. One of his cohorts at Thanet District Council was Cyril Hoser, a man, if memory serves, convicted of forging everything from dollar bills to ‘O’ level certificates. As I was too opinionated and distracted at school to stay on to take my ‘A’ levels (and not rich enough to buy any of Mr Hoser’s) I attended the local college in Ramsgate. Here, my first student political action was to occupy the office of Jonathan Aitken MP. His secretary said he was not in, but as he was the man who lied and lied and lied he may well have been hiding in the broom cupboard.

Among the local populace, Thanet District Council always had a reputation somewhere below that held by the residents of the London boroughs of Hackney or Lambeth about their councils. The locals expect political promises to fade and die and for politicians to feather their nests. I have no idea of the moral state of the current administration, though Private Eye did recently describe the council as ‘supine‘ and has also commented on its activities over a recent large scale development in the area.

Anyway, a return to Tory sleaze is great news for bloggers and satirists alike. It can’t be too long before shadow ministers are telling more intricate lies or throwing themselves on prostitutes while their backbench colleagues attempt to see who can swing from the rafters while eating citrus fruits (hopefully not air freighted, as that would spoil the party’s green agenda).