Desperate Tory wives

Robert Jackson, the MP for Wantage, has come in for a good deal of abuse, though if anything not enough. Put yourself in the position of those who have worked for a quarter of a century to install Mr Jackson in parliament, so that he can speak in the Conservative interest, and then imagine your feelings of revulsion and disgust when the aesthetic booby announces that he is flouncing across the floor. Why now? they must be asking themselves in Wantage. What have we done to deserve it?

It seems incredible that he should want to join the benches of a Labour Prime Minister who has been convicted of ruthless mendacity in the matter of Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction; who has presided over a gross expansion of the public payroll; and who as part of his general misgovernment of the country is continuing to enact all sorts of erosions of ancient freedoms. What is it about Labour that appeals to Robert, who is supposed to be one of these gentler, more liberal Tories? Blair’s attack on trial by jury? ID cards? Or is it perhaps the ban on hunting? It can hardly be the last, since on the day he announced his defection this prize ass turned out ‘in support’ of his local hunt, whose extinction is now assured thanks to the cowardice and connivance of the very Prime Minister before whom he now prostrates himself.

Perhaps it is the vast expansion of means-tested benefits that attracts Robert Jackson, with all their attendant poverty traps, corruption and bureaucracy. Perhaps he likes the high and regressive taxes on the poor. This is a man who prides himself on his interest in higher education, and his principled (and correct) stand in the matter of tuition fees.