Unfair but right

To the minds of many reasonable people the punishment meted out to Howard Flight, MP for Arundel and the South Downs, has been of unwarranted severity. No one — not even the genial Mr Flight — denies that his words were ill chosen. But his supporters would say that at heart they reflected nothing more than his general instinct for small government, and his general desire to stop waste and economise on spending — ambitions which all Tories should applaud. He was speaking at a private meeting, and did not expect to be reported. He was stitched up.

Many reasonable people, not a few of them among his fellow MPs and his constituency association, will feel that it would have been enough to sack him as Tory deputy chairman. There is something about the act of mandatory deselection, this unexpected Olympian thunderbolt, that has caused a frisson of horror in the Westminster village.