Oh Dear

I suppose the kindest thing you could say about the Bournemouth West M.P and Conservative Party Grandee Sir John Butterfill is that he is well liked by his constituents. Being more honest you'd have to say that for the second time in less than a year he has been shown to be a complete ass.

Last May he was exposed by the Daily Telegraph for avoiding paying any Capital Gains Tax on the £600,000 profit he made on what later emerged was his second home. As the Telegraph said at the time, "In the most striking example to date of an MP utilising the loose allowances system to benefit financially from the sale of a taxpayer-funded home, Sir John was able to avoid capital gains taxes of 40 per cent by making contradictory declarations to Parliament and the tax man. The declarations did not break the law. "

This week poor old Sir John, the thinking man's Boris Johnson, was found to be wanting again. He has become, largely it seems, the forgotten man of the Disptaches 'scandal'. As with his fellow Labour boasters he hasn't done anything wrong under current parliamentary rules but he has been a little naive to say the least. His boasting that he was close to David Cameron and that he could sit on the board of a company for £30-35,000 a meeting were the words of a man who was swayed by a pretty face and under the influence of having access to too much power.

Here was a man who was on the brink of retiring from the House of Commons and who was, so it is believed, on the verge of being proposed to the upper chamber, now it's all gone. In his defence he has since admitted he was a fool but he has lost the chance of a lifetime, a peerage was running towards him with its lights blazing away, now like the fire engines on their way to the Nakatomi building it has turned back.

Sir John claims that the parts of the programme that would have benefitted his comments were edited out, well that's the way it goes in the world of undercover journalism, you pays your money etc.

“What I’ve done in order to clarify things is to refer myself to the parliamentary commissioner for standards for an investigation. I’m thoroughly confident that I will be cleared by that but I think it’s the only way the press and public will see that I’ve not done anything wrong.”

He stressed he had not offered to do any lobbying work while still an MP. He said he had thought he was being approached because of his business experience more than his career as an MP.

When asked whether he would help the bogus company entertain ministers and civil servants, he had told the reporter it would be “totally inappropriate”, he said.

He added: “The other thing they omitted to show was my final discussion with them, where I said I certainly wouldn’t be becoming involved with them until I had done considerable due diligence, checking them out, making sure they were fit and proper people of high respectability and standing – because I had been approached similarly once before on this and when I did my investigations into the company, I discovered it was one with whom I would not wish to be associated.”

David Cameron yesterday condemned the Labour MPs seen in the programme and the spectacle of a Tory back-bencher “attempting to up his value by suggesting he was going to get a peerage”.

Of course it is right that the main headlines have been taken by the three Labour party MP's whose actions were highlighted and who have been suspended by the Parliamentary Labour Party. What the Sir John Butterfill's case highlights is that once you're a member of that club it's very difficult to not boast about the benefits of membership and that those in glass houses really shouldn't throw stones.

Just to make things even better for the Cameron camp the latest polls indicate that the Conservative lead not sits at a whopping 2 per cent. You have to say that if the Conservative's can't get elected after the events of the past two years then they probably never will, at least in my lifetime.