There is one word that frightens politicians more than any other: scandal.
They know that scandal can bring about personal ruin, cut short a promising career and even bring down a government.
The power of scandal is that it imprints itself on the public mind. Some are about sex, others about money, drugs or espionage. But they are all about power: the corrupter, the ultimate aphrodisiac.
This is your guide to the scandalous world of Westminster. Read on.
50. Sex and the Palace, March 2009
You wait years for a good, old-fashioned Commons sex scandal, and then one comes along and is immediately buried by weightier political controversy.
It was 22 March 2009 when the News of the World ran its exclusive on Nigel Griffiths. The married Labour MP for Edinburgh South had ‘cavorted’ with a mystery brunette in his Commons office — on Remembrance Day, of all days — and recorded the whole thing on camera. The paper printed some of the pictures it had got its hands on, including one of a stockinged leg poking out from behind an oak-panelled door. It was all salaciously compelling stuff. But then, exactly a week later, news of Jacqui Smith’s porn-film claims broke, kicking off the MPs’ expenses scandal good and proper. Griffiths’s dalliance was relegated to a footnote in the public mind.
49. Euan Blair arrested for being drunk and incapable, 5 July 2000
‘Sixteen-year-old boy gets stupidly drunk and vomits all over Leicester Square after finishing GCSEs’ is not much of a news story.
But when the 16-year-old in question is Tony Blair’s son and the Prime Minister has just proposed marching drunks to cashpoints to pay on-the-spot fines, it is a rather different matter. Just to make things worse for the Blairs, Euan initially gave a false name, address and age when arrested by the police for being drunk and incapable.
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