I cannot help but feel sorry for Michael Trend, the disgraced Conservative MP, who allegedly defrauded the taxpayer by claiming a whopping sum in false expenses. Michael Trend’s career and perhaps his life is now in ruins and he can look forward only to an eventual ignominious obscurity.
I wish to announce at once that Mr Trend is a family friend. Ho, you might say, if someone is a friend it’s all right then, they have merely ‘acted like a fool’. Whereas had I never met Mr Trend you might expect me to excoriate him as an example of corruption in British politics.
You would be perfectly right. One prefers to believe one’s friends are fools rather than scoundrels. In many cases, unfortunately, this is a delusion. The human capacity for liking a person simply because they are pleasant to one is quite astonishing.
But in the case of Michael Trend, the story is different.
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