darn

for a few, brief, cold moments i felt sorry for david cameron.
there he is sitting pretty able to take pot shots at gordon brown and new labour. cries of sleaze and incompetence ring out. peter hain providing a tanned easy target.
bish.
bosh.
bam.
right hook, left jab. to the chin. a body blow. gordon taking the shots like rocky, just hanging on.
and blow me down hasn’t the clunking fist of brown been rewarded? his rope a dope has paid off with the revelations of derek “kid cash” conway.
not only has mr conway been paying his two sons to do research while they were both studying at university, but he has managed no to keep any records of the work that they did. a bit of an ooops and double ooops there.
mrconway’s non apology was impressive for its lack of real remorse. in fact you got the distinct impression that what mrconway was sorry for was getting caught.

poor old cameron. he was doing so well; he was easily winning the rounds against brown, not quite landing the knock out blow. now he finds himself on the back foot trying to avoid being clunked by flailing debris of fallout from the conway affair.

in truth none of the parties come out smelling of roses. they all appear to be full of people who want to line their pockets and drop their snouts in the trough.
to be honest i don’t expect members of parliament to be paragons of virtue, but i do expect them to be competent. i don’t want to hear how they didn’t understand the rules, or how they were overworked, how it was just an administrative slip that they forgot to declare an amount of money that most of us have to work several years to earn.
if you can’t understand the rules of your own job you are not capable of passing laws that affect the country. if you cannot manage your work you are probably not the right person to administer the country.
members of parliament get paid more money than most of us, for that alone i expect a degree of competence. a lot of talk has been made about how they should be paid at a much higher rate so that the right people are attracted to the job. people with skill, people with drive and people who deserve the large reward (maybe it would attract the people who ran northern rock?). but let us be honest politics shouldn’t be about money it should be a vocation, parliamentary politics is about changing the country for the best, it is not about earning a wedge and lining your pockets.
but more and more it appears that for a number of politicians it is about the rewards and the perks.
even that doesn’t upset me, as long as they do it well and not in such a cack handed manner.