What’s the purpose of Tory retreads?

The Derek Conway affair highlights two important issues. First, can MPs be trusted with the vastly increased state funding they are hoping to slide through on the quiet? And second, what is the point of the ’97 Tory retreads like Derek?

Let’s deal with funding first. Remember that the main political parties already get between £19m and £50 every year in existing state funding, depending on how you do the calculations. This includes Short Money, which goes to opposition parties; taxpayer-funded special advisers, which benefit the government; and research funding, which benefit all of them – overall, state funding has increased by 430% since 1997.

You’d think they would be grateful. Not a bit of it! Their response to the Cash for Robes and other scandals has been to raise their hands to ask for even more state cash. Apparently they need more of our money to remove the temptation of selling peerages to fund their irritating election billboard campaigns - and yet more even more annoying spin doctors.

What really sticks is the way in which ever since the latest round of Hain-Conway scandals splatted onto our screens, politicians and ex-pols have lined up to assure us how clean our system really is, how it’s the “envy of the world”, how we are nothing like the Italians, or the Americans etc etc etc.

Bollocks! The Italians may be venal and hopelessly disorganised (no bad thing in my view – if you’ve got to have political masters, better they are disorganised than ruthlessly efficient), but at least they don’t have a whole second chamber of unelected cronies and contributors. And you may need a hedge fund to back your campaign in the Land of the Free, but at least you still have to get a few people to vote for you – over here, New Labour just dished out peerages and even ministerial posts to the highest bidder.

OK – so the Party which said in ’97 that the Tories were nasty, sleazy and incompetent have proved themselves to be even nastier, sleazier and more incompetent. But it also appears many Tories have not learned their lesson either. The bottom line is that none of them can be trusted with even more state funding. Let them spend less, instead. We’d all be better off.

Now onto those ’97 Tory retreads. Let me declare an interest. I was shortlisted with Derek for Bexley and Old Sidcup and he won – this may have been partly due to the fact that I withdrew because the selection clashed with England v South Africa, for which I had tickets. That is called prioritising.

But why did Derek bother? What has he done since he got back in 2001?  Even his website is “under construction”. And then there’s Greg Knight. Actually, Greg is rather a good bloke. A genuine character and one of the few Tories to take animal welfare seriously. But you seriously do have to question whether he has been worth his salary (and allowances) since 2001. Silent Knight.

And don’t even get me onto the subject of Alister Burt and Andrew Mitchell. Little Ali was significantly responsible as a junior minister under John Major for the disastrous CSA debacle, which caused misery for thousands. Mitch was equally culpable for the CSA as a minister, to which you can add that he lost one of the safest Tory seats in the East Midlands – inexcusable even in 1997.  

So what, I ask again, is the point of these ’97 retreads? Thank God I saw sense before I too became one!

Phillip Oppenheim