Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw

So Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw have been caught out apparently making incautious statements in a sting operation by Channel 4 and The Daily Telegraph. They thought they were talking to a Chinese company wanting to further their interests.

And as seems common these days the press and politicians seem unable to take the obvious lesson from this, instead focussing on the strictly legal aspects or arguing about the exact words used (I call this ‘the Nick Robinson bubble’), rather than stepping back and looking at the more obvious aspects.

With the phone hacking enquiry where David Cameron (aided by hacked off) misdirected is to a fabulously expensive enquiry (run by Lord Leveson) designed to find wrongdoing by the press and recommend convenient limitations to press freedom, whereas in fact the hacking was already illegal but had not been prosecuted by the police (arguably because they had been told to prioritize terrorism).

Similarly in this case surely the real story is that two supposedly immensely talented politicians who have had power and honours showered on them are apparently prepared to peddle their influence, betraying their principles, their former colleagues and arguably their country along the way. Some argued that it is important for MPs to have outside jobs to bring their experience to their job as an MP.  But this kind of job, which doesn’t appear to be a real job at all?  Isn’t it just selling the sacred trust and access bestowed on senior ministers without apparently doing any real work at all.

Surely these ‘multi-talented’ individuals could do better than this?  Is there nothing constructive they could do?

I the end I suppose we reap what we sow.  If we vote for people without real principles maybe this is what we should expect – but to me that’s the story – that they even thought this the kind of thing they should be doing at all.  It goes some way to expose how cheaply some politicians have sold out to lobbies like the fossil fuel lobby.