What a carry on!
Last updated 14:25, Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Not big, not clever, not even politics really – but as men behaving badly, so very entertaining.
Glamour, location, boys and expensive toys, a bit – actually rather a lot – of spicy bitching as garnish and you could safely submit this tacky plot for a modern-day Carry On film.
What would we call it? Carry On Up the Oligarch? Sounds fair enough. It has, after all been a proper carry on and there’s an oligarch (whatever one of those is, when it’s at home) at the centre of it. In addition, like a second-rate comic farce, it threatens to run and run.
Did George Osborne cross the lines of seemly electoral behaviour and consider going cap in hand to Oleg Deropaska for a £50,000 top up for Tory party funds? Or did he merely cross Peter Mandelson – now perfectly titled for an Elstree film credit roll as Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool?
George, who has already groomed and perfected his B-movie looks in preparation for his starring role in this yacht-based Mediterranean movie of men let out without their minders, denies – very carefully – doing anything wrong. He has not committed any offence against the laws of the electoral rule book, he says.
Oh dear, oh dear – that’s him in the soup then. Committing an offence against the sensitivities of the master of political dark arts is infinitely more serious and it’s hard now to imagine how poor star-struck George will survive the storm. He absolutely is not in the same league as the noble Lord. He’s probably realising that only now.
So what did he do to ruffle Lord M’s ermine? He revealed to all and sundry that, while in Corfu, Lord Peter, the come-back king, had “dripped poison” about Gordon Brown.
There’s nothing men of Lord M of F and H’s standing hate more than having a confidence broken by a snitch. Eager to please George O ought to have known that.
So what lessons are to be learned from this sorry state of high-flying affairs? Well... where do we start? It might be a good idea in future if politicians were to book holidays through Thomas Cook, Ryanair or Jet2.com, like the rest of us. There’s no such thing as an Oligarch’s painless freebie.
Another bright move might be for politicos to keep their minds on the job in hand – like our tumultuous economy and looming recession for instance? The future is bound to look too artificially bright from the sun deck of a yacht, while chewing on ice cream cones stuffed with Beluga caviar.
When gossiping to impress, with tales out of school, always bear in mind betrayal never passes without punishing consequence.
And – one for all politicians of any complexion –if you want people to vote for you, they’re going to have to trust you and your messing about in boats with foreign billionaires while your potential voters fight off repossession of their homes just ain’t the way to do it.
