Four years ago I was in a windowless room within the parliamentary estate. I was working in David Cameron’s opposition office at the time and a number of Tory political advisers had been corralled into said room to go line-by-line, page-by-page through the expenses forms for all Tory MPs. This was in the middle of the corrosive drip-dripping of expenses stories, and British politics had hit its nadir.
Since then I’ve spent a lot of time living and working in SE Asia, which has enabled me to peer at the Westminster ant farm with a bit more perspective. On my last visit back to SW1, just over a month ago, I found it gripped by the Mercer and Yeo lobbying scandals. Disproportionality so, I thought.
The existence of the stings, the absence of real lobbyists, the unrestricted publicity, the public opprobrium, the politicians scrambling for action – all these were signs of a healthy democracy, not a diseased one.
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