Is Team Cameron behind the Tory ’sleaze’ exposes?

I won’t go into the details of all the Tory expenses controversy suddenly gripping the political classes, Guido Fawkes does a good enough job over on his Order Order site so if you need an update, just scroll through the entire weeks worth of news, it’s quite a good read.

What I have found interesting are the theories over who is behind it. As Recess Monkey sums up, Labour seem too disorganised at the moment to come out with such a damaging and sustained attack on the Tories, leaving us guessing at who it could be. The current theory is that it could well be Team Cameron behind the exposes, ‘clearing out dead wood’, as Recess Monkey puts it.

I find this an interesting theory, none of those revealed to be fiddling expenses (or appearing to) are definitively ‘Cameroon’ and the fact that two of the people who are now gone are the leader of the Conservative MEPs and the Chief MEP Whip, could suggest Cameron is trying to mould the European wing of the party to be more in line with his own vision. It will be interesting to see who replaces them. It could be vital for Cameron to avoid splits in the party further down the line, when Europe inevitably rears its ugly (to Tories) head.

The one thing against this I think is the current Tory Chairwoman, Caroline Spelmen, who may not be a Cameroon but was supposedly a Kenneth Clarke-ite, which surely would put her on the right side of the similarly ‘progressive’ Cameron. Perhaps she is too closely linked to Cameron’s predecessor Michael Howard, who supposedly wanted David Davis as party Leader after him? I can’t see it being big enough reason to get rid of her though.

However, Recess Monkey is not the only one thinking the leaks may be coming from within the Tory party, Guido Fawkes also believes the violence to be ‘Blue on Blue’, though he doesn’t mention that it could be Team Cameron directly. He does however, naively in my view, believe Cameron is taking a genuine hardline response to all this, namely to fire any MEP caught breaking expenses rules. The reason I’m slightly more cynical about this is simply because I find it hard to believe that Cameron knows no more about this than you or I do, and in making that statement I believe he’s fairly confident he won’t have to fire any more than one or two others, at most. If he really believed that in making such a statement he might have to fire a dozen MEPs then I don’t think he’d make it.

It might endear him to the public but surely it would throw his party into disarray and possibly create massive disgruntlement for firing people over what many in the party may think is a system of expenses that has been in place for years before he came along. It suits Cameron much more to make a few examples of people and then try to sort it out behind the scenes.

This is another reason why I wonder if Recess Monkey is on to something. If Team Cameron is behind this, or at least knew about it, you can see why they’d allow it/leak it out to the press.

They’ve got a probable unassailable lead in the polls, this would have crushed the Tories last year in Browns honeymoon, now it will probably barely dent their popularity.

As the expenses ‘fiddles’ have all come from more senior members of the party, who have subsequently been sacked, it allows Cameron to present himself as the moderniser of his party, purging it from its past sins. In a bizarre way, it allows him to continue to decontaminate the Conservative brand.

He can replace senior positions in the European wing of the party with his own men, specifically the leader of the MEPs and the Chief Whip.

It allows himself to present himself to the public as something of a political outsider, pledging to come in and clean up the system, not unlike his hero, Tony Blair.

Like Tony Blair, is allows him to confront his own party while having the backing of the general public. Again - outside the system, and not of it.

Another thing where I thought the spin operation was working quite well for the Tories, was that a ’source’ defending Spelmen said she was a victim of Tory ’sexism’ from the 1990s. She was supposedly told she would have to educate her children in her constituency, so that resulted in her hiring a nanny using parliamentary allowances claiming her to also be a secretary, despite the fact that said ’secretary’ said her work consisted of forwarding a few letters and answering the phone every now and then.

However, by bringing up the ’sexist’ issue within the context of ‘old Conservatives’ and ‘now’, Cameron effectively underlines the difference between the Conservatives under himself and how they used to be before he came along and effectively saved them.

Hence, it wouldn’t surprise me if Cameron did know about it and/or his team were involved in at some level.

What does annoy me about this sort of thing where Cameron gets plaudits for ‘modernising’ the Conservative party, is that really he is only bringing them to where Labour were under Blair over ELEVEN years ago. So Cameron wants more women and ethnic minority MPs? No wonder, they only have 17 and 2 respectively, Labour have miles more. But I don’t see why we should be giving him a pat on the back for not being a regressive msyogonist. It should be more like ‘Yes well done on finally getting to the 21st century, now get on with it’.

It’s a situation where Labour must secretly be infuriated, even if it is an area where they have completely dominated and won the ‘argument’ politically. If Labour announce a ‘family friendly’ policy, it might be news for a day, but thats it. After all, we’ve had eleven years of progressive policies in this area. If the Tories made the same policy announcement, it would be headline news for at least double the length of time, simply because its the Tories coming out with something that’s not totally out of touch with modern life.

It seems at the moment all David Cameron has to do to waltz into Number 10 is witter on about how much he likes families. It’s ironic that the Conservatives sheer regressiveness for all these years would end up being a boon for Cameron, as it’s made it so much easier for him to look appealing and progressive. If William Hague had started this process way back when he was leader then Cameron would have much less ground in this area to pursue and the press would subject the Tories to the same indifference/questioning as they do Labour in this area.

You may also notice I put sleave in comma’s in the heading, that’s because generally I associate sleaze with sex, not money. However I can see why the idea of backhanders and dodgy deals with lots of nodding and winking is also sleazy, but most of the Labour so-called sleaze was just incompetent handling of cash and wishing to avoid having to declare donors. There is as of yet no evidence of cash for access or anything, and nothing on the scale of Derek Conway or Caroline Spelmen or any of the Tory MEPs OR Alan Duncan taking money off a business firm that was fined for taking kickbacks from Saddam Hussein.