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By Peter Wilhelm
Nobody can churn out sex scandals involving the high-and-mighty like the UK. Perhaps it’s because these unfortunates get caught in especially lurid circumstances, or that their excuses and expostulations lack any credence whatsoever. But an enormous array of tabloid newspapers, the Internet, and just plain social and asocial media suck up this kind of stuff like pigs crossed with elephants for a grateful, lascivious audience.
Among the latest to fall calamitously is one Lord John Sewell, former Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords until someone filmed him naked snorting cocaine with two £200 a night prostitutes. Philanderers should beware any hooker who may be concealing a camera in her bra.
The Sun on Sunday put the matter in its true perspective (even sleazier for circulation) by noting that Lord John’s “sordid romp” was accompanied by the voice of the disgraced ex-Peer dismissing his colleagues as rogues, liars, bastards, expenses crooks, and so forth.
Embarrassingly for Sewell, as chair of a parliamentary panel on ethics he recently wrote: “Scandals make good headlines. The requirement that members must always act on their personal honour has been reinforced.”
To which his boss, the wonderfully named Lord Speaker Baroness Frances Gertrude Claire D’Souza, essentially described him as revolting, an abhorrence to the Lords (from which he swiftly resigned), and that she would refer his case to a committee whose rules he helped draw up – and to the police.
In short, Sewell really stuffed up and has been slut-shamed.
I know nothing of the House of Lords, or Peers, other than that Britain’s ruling class rests on a bizarre bed-frame of monarchy, anti-monarchist socialism, Bertie Wooster-style fools – all members of the Drones Club who add naught to the Brits’ pornotopia. Why do they deny it? Male politicians worldwide lie, cheat, appoint morons, and snort coke with tarts.
In some countries this is brushed aside. Think of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, repeatedly discovered in a moral sewer and just scraping out by his ragged fingernails. He has boasted of drooling over young girls, and while his slatterns have fled, polls show the voters wouldn’t mind him back. Which could occur.
Again, over in the US, a recent headline had this to say: “I WAS DRUNK AT THE STRIP CLUB BECAUSE I WAS UNDERCOVER.” Questions arise: was he drunk because it was a job requirement (for, say, a cop); or is being drunk in a strip club in itself a felony? The issues circle upon each other. It’s like asking whether Marilyn Monroe and JFK were doing more than playing footsie.
No-one cares anymore. Indeed, these two old flames have bequeathed at least an urban legend to their nation that gives them both a species of historical aurora. One day Sewell may only be remembered – if at all, given the gruesome teraflop of information sidling in the tabloid door – as some squalid clown from the past.
However, it’s even worse than that. Many “disgraced” American politicians (of the type that post pictures of their underwear on Facebook) soon shrug off the tabloids and continue or return to public life. It’s as commonplace as faking the existence of a PhD from Oxford or the LSE to get ahead here at home. Why don’t these people realise how much more salubrious and endearing it would be to simply admit: “I have a Grade 1 in Woodwork”?
But if that’s all you have, you have to be related to Jacob Zuma.
Or, to misquote a line from a Tom Stoppard play, spoken by a dictator: “We here in KwaAzania have a relatively free press. It’s free for my relatives.” Or even something along the lines of a famous royal courtesan assailed by the mob for being “the Catholic whore” leaned out the window of her carriage and screamed: “You fools! I’m not the Catholic whore. I’m the Protestant whore.”
Of course, you can take pride in honesty, but then you can’t feed your family.
I suspect that if Sewell is fulsomely expelled from the House of Lords (losing his miserly stipend) he will simply retire to Downton Abbey (his by right of primogeniture) and write his memoirs. If he actually wants to get them published he’d best include every last detail. That may take some time, but he will have the place to himself and can try selected passages out aloud in the echoing halls.
On the other hand, to return to a phrase I used above, “slut-shaming”. Without evidence (though how is that to be obtained?) an entire slew of figures have been subjected to this hypocritical flagellation. And who can we blame?
Ourselves of course, as readers craving disgrace, real or imagined. There is an often flouted distinction between investigative reporting and slut-shaming.
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