Tories and Lib Dems pass on will donation to contain row

So both the Lib Dems and the Tories have yielded to the inevitable, and passed on the Joan LB Edwards donation to the Treasury. Their responses were swifter than even critical friends might have expected. The Lib Dems were first out of the starting blocks in the race to the moral high ground by announcing they’d be writing a cheque to the Treasury. But before Nick Clegg even had time to start recording a new autotune version of ‘I’m Sorry’ about how ‘we took a donation that we couldn’t possibly keep (but frankly could have done with given the state of the party coffers)’, the Tories decided they had to do the same.

So that’s that, row contained and moral high ground reached by both parties. Except stories like this never do politics any favours at all. And that the parties waited until the Daily Mail got annoyed following the Electoral Commission’s publication of Q2 donation stats, rather than deciding to pass the donation on straight away doesn’t do politics any favours either.