the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Last night I crashed on my bed fully clothed at about 10pm, only to wake at 2.30am feeling a compulsion to get on my exercise bike because my legs were telling me I needed to. After doing the bike, I was sitting on the toilet thinking and one of the the things I was thinking was that when I’m sitting on the toilet, my mind imitates the buffalo in those old Western songs, roaming free and that after doing the bike, there’s no stopping it.

Another thing I reflected on was this new fangled behaviour of any politician embroiled in a scandal to brazenly front it out, as if in any other job that would be an OK thing to do. When did this happen? When did resigning as a matter of honour become considered passé? The last politician I can remember doing that was Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary at the time of the Falklands War in ’82. He did the decent thing, because he felt he’d let the country down by not taking the threat posed by Argentina seriously enough. That reason that it sticks in my mind was because it impressed me, was the value that he placed on his own integrity, given I have so little of it myself.

Although I flatter myself that I gave a tiny bit more than Jacqui Smith, one of New Labours Home Secretary’s. Remember her? She tried to style out the revelation that she had claimed expenses for some porn films her husband had watched. Classy! Or to that married Mark Oaten, who paid rent boys to do things not even the tabloids would reveal, and you know things are really bad when the tabloids get prudish.

He got them to shit in his mouth. Really.

Mind you, they’re all amateurs when compared to Keith Vaz, the former chair of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. He imagined that there was nothing at all hypocritical in lambasting others peoples morals when he was offering to buy cocaine for rent boys and having unprotected sex with them. That must’ve been a tricky conversation with his wife when that one came out. Unlike him.

And after month after resigning as chair of that committee, he was elected onto the Justice Select Committee. I know!

There have been loads more, but at 3am, those were the ones I recalled. I thought he’d do well to emulate Peter Mandleson, one of the architects of the travesty that was ‘New’ Labour. Old bollocks more like.

Like Goings’s, he too had the unwavering support of the PM, having helped him re-fashion Labour into a watered down but electable version of socialism. Johnson depends on him in much the same way and therefore willing to expend his political capital to keep him safe. He too had attained powerful yet undefined role at the heart of government, was both feared and loathed in equal measure by everyone bar the PM it seemed and was therefore able to ride out one scandal, eventually resign, come back to frontline politics before another scandal had him made a Lord.

That’s why I thought of Goings’ and how he’s trying to style it out, calculating that attention will quickly move off him, being someone who clearly thinks his honour is a judicial title only.

Mind you, duty calls. LMS has asked me how many grapes I can fit into my mouth…