I'm a cautious soul at heart. I like to have as much information as I can get before I plump for a particular choice. On one hand this, on the other, that. I tend to be suspicious of the obvious answer. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I'm not great at strategic board games. When I played the Germans in 'Sturm nach Osten', I was great as far as taking Kiev was concerned, but tended to waste time admiring my handiwork without focussing on the next step.
And in the great MP expenses scandal, perhaps some honest reflection has turned out to be a pretty decent strategy. Labour have held the line, with only those MPs found guilty of mortgage interest fraud walking the plank or, rather more accurately, standing at the end of one whilst someone saws it off near the ship. The calls for individual MPs to go have, for the most part, been comparatively limited. Is there really any likelihood that Gerald Kaufman will go, for example? Margaret Moran is, I grant you, an exception, but once St Esther of the Jungle had got her teeth in, it wasn't going to go away. No, most of them will attempt to bail out and head for the Lords, in the expectation that Lords reform remains a dream.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, have provided a regular supply of shark bait. Egged on the voracious followers of Guido Fawkes, the consistent sacrifice of those who were greedy rather than criminal has rather lowered the bar in terms of the level of offence that suffices to end a career. It looked quite clever to pension off a few aging knights of the shires, until it becane clear that if the likes of Sir Peter Viggers had to go, there were so many more whose failings were of a similar, if not quite so ridiculous, degree.
And the problem is that blood attracts sharks. When there is such a mob mentality, it is a brave politicians who stands up and says, "It was only a duck house, and I paid the money back, what more do you want?". As for those who acted on the advice of the Fees Office, is the latter's incompetence or spinelessness likely to be taken into account? Didn't think so.
You'll have to judge for yourself whether or not the approach of the Liberal Democrat leadership has been appropriate. However, whilst the initial response of a minority of Lib Dem bloggers was to reach for the nearest lamppost and piano wire, as far as the Commons is concerned at least, there has been little organised effort to defenestrate any of them. There has been, it appears, a realisation that, in comparison with charges of flipping, moat cleaning and dodgy mortgage interest claims, their offences have been ones of vanity rather than outright greed.
So, perhaps the rush to punish has served a political purpose in terms of making the weather, but in terms of changing the climate, has a little reflection allowed for some rather more long lasting?
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