Political scandal comes in threes as far as Tories on the Fylde Coast are concerned.
First, Scott Benton was caught appearing to offer to leak confidential information and lobby ministers in exchange for payments during an undercover sting by The Times. Then, Paul Maynard was accused of using very significant sums of taxpayers' money to fund his own campaigning.
Now, Mark Menzies seems to have completed the triangle of shame as the area’s third Tory MP to become mired in a mess of his own making. According to the same newspaper, the 52-year-old misused campaign funds to pay off “bad people” who had locked him in a flat hours after he’d met up with someone through a dating app.
What followed, according to the newspaper, was a panicked 3am phone call to a retired former office manager in which he demanded thousands of pounds as a “matter of life and death”. The “bad people” were eventually paid off with money from a different office manager’s personal account and that money reimbursed from campaign funds.
The details of the Times’ allegations are startling from beginning to end. If an MP wants to meet up with a man he’s met online, that’s his business. But how he ends up apparently locked in the flat of a third person, being extorted for thousands of pounds, raises alarming questions about his judgment.
Like in the case of Benton, and to some extent the much milder allegations made against Maynard, the role and value of money is a million miles away from the experiences of constituents trying to survive the cost of living crisis. A tool to be used without any thought or sense of what it's actually for.
Benton used a respected and high-paying job to secure more income for himself from gambling firms. Menzies reportedly was happy to use thousands of pounds of donated money to pay for medical bills and to free him from the “bad people”.
Menzies denies wrongdoing but it’s hard to escape the thought he’s using the ‘ongoing investigation’ as a reason not to answer any individual aspects of the extraordinary allegations. All the while, another Lancashire constituency is left without proper representation and instead is left with an MP who is suspended from the party which residents thought they had elected.
There’s also another problematic element in these issues that needs to be addressed. When the leaked recording of Scott Benton first emerged, his first reaction was to deny any wrongdoing. He then dragged things out further by appealing against the Standards Committee ruling that he should be suspended for 35 days.
Once that was eventually dismissed, he said a recall petition was a waste of taxpayers’ money with a General Election happening soon anyway - though that could be as late as January 2025 and still has no date set - before ensuring it truly was a waste of time and money by resigning a week after it kicked off.
In Menzies’ case, and what is perhaps the most troubling element of it, the response of the Conservative Party has been similarly glacial to the extent of being almost non-existent. Almost anyone reading the allegations against Menzies would be shocked and alarmed and have many more questions.
However, this seemingly does apply to those in Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) - the matter was first reported in January but Menzies was only suspended after the report was published. The 78-year-old who reported receiving the panicked, early morning phone call believes CCHQ were happy to sweep the matter under the carpet and on the basis of the slow response, it’s very hard to disagree.
Had the matter not been forced into public consciousness, would any action have been taken against Menzies? Or would he still be in place for the next General Election without any significant probing of what had happened?
Given the actions of the Government in recent years and its desperate efforts to retain what power it still has, it’s hard to have anything but a cynical response to these questions. The people of the Fylde Coast and the rest of the country have been failed by their MPs, and their government, with the only consolation being that both are likely to be consigned to the history books.
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