Saturday 30 April 2022 The Guardian •

3

H

ow 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 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 off ering 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 fi nish 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

has nothing to do with wanking and everything to do

with power. Unlike the blameless Angela Rayner, men

who obtrusively watch porn where they know it might

make others feel uncomfortable genuinely are engaged

Keir Starmer

addresses

the packed

Conservative

benches at

prime minister’s

questions

this week

PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA

TAYLOR/HOC/REUTERS

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. It is 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” , nor is it for the young male staff ers who have also

experienced unwanted 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 fl ashiness 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.

A

nyway, 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 , unfi tness for high offi ce 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 eff ectively 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, 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 have

been 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.

It’s the last days

of Rome for

this shameless

government

Opinion

Men watching

porn where

they know it might

make others feel

uncomfortable are

engaged in a form

of exhibitionism

Marina

Hyde