ON ONE HAND A RATHER PATHETIC OLD MAN PAYING FOR SEX...ON THE OTHER HAND THATCHER'S MINISTERS AND THEIR EVIL

Mr Sewel in his Lordly costume... Note the hat...

It has been suggested that the Sun on Sunday yesterday, and the Sun today, reporting that Mr Sewel, the Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords has been caught in a sting, snorting cocaine, going with prostitutes, and wearing a bra, was motivated by party political revenge for the revelations that ex-Tory grandees from the Thatcher era, were indeed involved in child molestation and possibly murder in their murky pasts.

Really?

Let's be honest about this, taking cocaine is illegal (although as Niko points out on his blog, it's maybe something the Tories wouldn't be overly keen to make a big fuss about...as the video shows). 

I'm not sure what the law in England says about prostitutes, but I suspect that it's probably not legal to pay for sex. So there. He broke the law on two counts. 

As far as I remember there is nothing illegal about wearing a bra, no matter how silly it makes you look. We are told that he was unflattering in his comments about Tony Blair and David Cameron. Well, find me someone who's not... and, at least for the moment, that is still not against English law. (It never will be a crime in Scots Law.)

Another get up and another hat...goodness he does like dressing up.

On the other hand, the revelations that the Cabinet Office has been hiding papers which confirm a list of deviants in the Cabinet of Mrs Thatcher, and in the Establishment that surrounded her, is a very much more important and worrying thing...not least for the fact that people knew about it at the time and have done ever since and they did nothing, hid the papers, and lauded the miscreants plying them with highly paid jobs and titles. Although, I admit, the word 'miscreants' is such an understatement that it sounds ridiculous. 

By comparison a little old man from the middle reaches of the Establishment who snorts cocaine and who has to pay for sex is as of nothing. 

Of course, it's unfortunate, but utterly typical of what we're continually discovering about the UK Establishment, that the head of a committee on probity in one of the houses of parliament is rather less than squeaky clean when it comes to probity himself. 

But we're used to that sort of thing by now, and in the end, he has done no one but himslef any harm.

Or dressing down...
On balance I preferred the ones with the silly hats.

I don't know, or much care, whether he will face prosecution for drug taking or paying for sex. What I do know is that he has lost an £80,000 a year job, and will almost certainly have to retire from the House of Lords, although I understand there is no mechanism for relieving him of the title. Into the bargain he must know that hundreds of thousands of us all over the UK have been falling about laughing at the pictures, and will never hear his name or see his face again without a fit of giggling.

But, no one at all, or at least no one sane, will ever be laughing at what some of Thatcher's cabinet and its friends were up to.

No comparison.