Opinion

Lord Sewel scandal makes good headlines

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

For the umpteenth time, we get to see how even piffling status fools people into thinking they can behave how they like and get away with it. Well, ‘people’ almost always means men of a certain age, old enough to know better and in politics bound to know bad behaviour will smear their reputations forever, make ammunition to attack their parties and advance their enemies. Wouldn’t you think?

‘End of the peer’; ‘Oh Lord!’; ‘Drug Lord’. The sting that stung a minor House of Lords figure has delivered juicy headlines and toe-curling images, finished a career of little distinction, did who knows what to a marriage and a family, and switched the spotlight off the latest Tory sharp move.

The Observer led their front page with ‘Hunt’s U-turn on social care’, about health secretary Jeremy Hunt shelving the Conservative election pledge to help old people avoid selling their homes to pay for care. The announcement slipped out in a parliamentary written answer, the kind of story with no chance against a front page showing a bespectacled face hunched over rolled-up banknote, one end in a nostril, the other in a little pile of white powder. Wedding ring finger towards the camera, steering the banknote. Photo alongside, for identification purposes - because Lord Sewel is no household face - of bespectacled chap in collar and tie plus ermine and red robe.

‘Top peer’s drug binges with £200 prostitutes’. Bit of a stretch, that, though what is a ‘top peer’ anyhow? Well, ‘he’s the one in charge of standards.’ Pretence enough of high-mindedness for the Sun’s (Sunday Sun scores again, after their previous Heil Highnesses) six page treatment, plus another instalment yesterday. Lots of material: chair of the ‘Privileges and Conduct committee’, rent-protected flat in the complex favoured by Westminster figures now finally being investigated as part of the decades-old rumours of a paedophile ring, junior minister in Tony Blair’s first government whose name became part of Scottish devolutionary machinery.

Plus, plus, plus: sozzled and whiny stream of political incorrectness, opinions of staggering self-importance. Calling Cameron facile is not wrong, but Boris ‘a fool’ while you borrow an orange bra (from the sex-worker busy filming you, among other things)? Pretty young Asian ladies ‘who sort of look innocent but...’

Mainly there is a video that keeps on giving. So we got yesterday’s front page orange bra loosely draped under leather jacket on well-rounded stomach as the lord leans back on his bed with a cigarette. (Yesterday’s headline? The BBC website ran the front page so the more fastidious could keep up without buying the Sun: ‘Busted.’) Though by now the Telegraph was trumpeting that the Lords themselves had asked police to investigate, and Baron Sewel had resigned his job as the ‘Lords Commissioner for Standards’. In which capacity he steered through a bill which for the first time allows peers to be suspended indefinitely, even expelled, and which he apparently wrote up pompously a fortnight ago for the Huffington Post. (It’s okay, they don’t pay contributors.) ‘Scandals,’ he wrote, ‘make good headlines.’

How do these chaps lose the ability to imagine getting caught, and then bluster or pout so resentfully? There must be a link, since elements recur so often.

An infinitely more staid story has been trundling through Dublin courts and reached another stage on Friday, the tale of Donegal Fianna Fáil senator Brian Ó Domhnaill whose travel and subsistence claims from his period as a Donegal County councillor have been queried. Except the investigation, due to begin in June 2012, was stalled by his challenge to the Standards in Public Office Commission. First on the grounds that the complaint against him to the commission was anonymous, which it was not, and then that to properly investigate him the commission must be made up of bilingual members, ‘able to conduct and understand proceedings (in Irish) without an interpreter.’

Otherwise his rights as in Irish-speaker would be infringed, because translator evidence is not the equal of direct evidence.

The Court of Appeal dismissed his challenge last Friday. It was noted along the way that he had pursued his case in English for three years. (The court did not pose aloud the question ‘What’s the Irish for “chancer”?’)

‘Blair Crony Scandal’ was one of the Sun’s duller headlines. As these pages and beyond track cronies and fixers, some southern figures have been heard to jeer ‘real politics up north now.’

Nothing like the Sun, really. Just one sniff of cocaine, allegedly, according to one blogger. Still smells.