Me Too! Me Too! No sooner does David Cameron order Tory MPs to come clean about family members on the Parliamentary payroll than Gordon Brown parades his own anti-sleaze credentials.

 

Their competition to appear squeaky clean shows how deeply all parties have been shaken by the Derek Conway affair.

 

This time, politicians seem instinctively to understand that the old soothing nostrums just won't wash. British public life is basically clean ... Just the odd rotten apple ... Corruption here nowhere near as bad as in other countries ... such smug excuses have been trotted out in scandal after scandal.

 

But doesn't Derek Conway's brass-necked greed put a rather different complexion on things?

 

His nice little earner didn't emerge in a vacuum. It is simply the latest, most glaring example of the self-serving grubbiness that seems to have become entrenched at Westminster.

 

Tony Blair, whose lust for money seems to know no bounds, was up to his neck in sleaze, from the Formula One affair at the beginning of his tenure to the cash for peerages scandal at the end.

 

Meanwhile, MPs repeatedly awarded themselves higher pay, gold-plated pensions and vast expenses, while trying to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act so their constituents wouldn't discover what they were up to.

 

Oh, and watchdogs who blew the whistle - such as Parliamentary Commissioner Elizabeth Filkin - soon found themselves squeezed out of their jobs.

 

The Conway affair is undoubtedly a shock to the system. Might it not also be a blessing in disguise, if politicians learn something from it?

 

source : Mail on Sunday

 

Wouldn't it be interesting if journalists who write this sort of article had to declare their own salary and expenses?

 

After all, the editor of the Daily Mail is paid around £1m per year, well over five times the Prime Minister's salary.

Wouldn't it be interesting if journalists who write this sort of article had to declare their own salary and expenses?

 

After all, the editor of the Daily Mail is paid around £1m per year, well over five times the Prime Minister's salary.

 

lol.. good point. i wonder how many masonic backhanders hes taken too...

Wouldn't it be interesting if journalists who write this sort of article had to declare their own salary and expenses?

 

After all, the editor of the Daily Mail is paid around £1m per year, well over five times the Prime Minister's salary.

 

Good point, but two wrongs hardly make a right... And, well, let's put it this way, as bad as they are, tabloid journos dont have any sort of mandate to actually make laws.....

 

It may interest you to read Private Eye sometime, especially the "Street of Shame" section of the mag, they usually print articles about newspaper bosses and journalists' "interests" in there, it can be quite an eye opener sometimes....