Shit-of-the-year nominee:

This is, word-for-word, from Tory Diary on ConservativeHome:

The Daily Mail is reporting that Andrew Pelling was held by police yesterday on suspicion of “assaulting his wife”. He’s been released on bail.

Andrew was elected as the Conservative MP for Croydon Central in 2005 with a majority of just 75 votes, and retains his position as an active London Assembly Member and Councillor in the area.

If this is proven to be true and his wife presses charges, he will face a difficult parliamentary election.

Comments have been disabled on this post.

Pelling uses his own website to say of himself:

Andrew does not really see himself as a politician…. Even the Leader of the London Greens called him ‘the acceptable face of Conservativism.”
Andrew, who lives locally, also has an independent streak.

The Mail (for all its innumerable faults) does this kind of story quite poetically, with the right admixture of offended horror and salacious detail. So, here’s how it goes:

His first wife, of 18 years, went back to Japan to care for her father. In those ten months, Pelling started an affair with Lucy Slaytor, half his age and a Tory campaign worker, even installing her in the house with his three teenage children:

… daughter Elizabeth said her father brought Miss Slaytor home while her mother was away.

Elizabeth said: “She spent a whole weekend here.

“She just thrust herself upon me and my sister and brother. They told us together over breakfast that they were in love and wanted to get married and have children. We all felt awful. We couldn’t believe he was doing this to us.”

Now, Malcolm finds this next bit sooo touching:

After his relationship with Lucy Slaytor was made public his first wife, Sanae, accused Mr Pelling of posting envelopes containing housekeeping money through the family home letter box so he could avoid her.

She said at the time: “Once my children ran out to catch him before he left, but he drove away. They were in tears. They couldn’t understand how their father could choose a woman half his age over them.”

Mr Pelling moved in with Miss Slaytor’s parents and admitted putting cash through his wife’s letter box, saying: “I am proud that I support my wife and our children financially.”

It’s that nice “I am proud…” that sets the whole thing off, don’t you think?

The Mail’s news item is rounded off by two other details:

Mr Pelling hit the headlines again in February this year when he advised two constituents to vote for the BNP…

In January he tabled a parliamentary Motion marking the death of chef Rick Stein’s dog, Chalky.

ConservativeHome’s treatment tells Malcolm all he needs to know about the Tory mind: that friendly use of the first-name, ‘Andrew’; the bit about the ‘difficult parliamentary election’; that ambiguous ‘active’ and the refusal to allow comments.

Meanwhile, let us not forget where the leader of the Conservative Party stands:

… stressing that families must remain the bedrock of society and should “matter more than anything else in our society”, Mr Cameron insisted: “If we can get the family right, we can fix our broken society.”

Mervyn in the Lion’s den

The Manager wanted no trouble, And took out his purse right away: And said, ‘How much to settle the matter?’
And Pa said, ‘What do you usually pay?’

Mervyn King’s “grilling” by the Commons Treasury Committee turned out to be a light toasting (which Malcolm watched, courtesy of BBC24). He was on the spot because he was scheduled to report on the August inflation statement (which, inevitably, went by the board).

King’s “get out of gaol card” was played early and, in effect, was predicted by Malcolm just yesterday: the need to reconcile four separate pieces of legislation. Those four pieces turn out to be the Takeover Code, the Market Abuse Directive of 2005, the freezing of a bank’s deposits once it goes into liquidation, and the lack of a guarantee once deposits fall below 100% of commitments. At least, that’s how Malcolm heard it.

The members of the Committee seemed non-plussed by the tri-partite control of the market, with the Bank, the Financial Services Agency, and the Treasury all involved, and apparently largely overlapping. King was effective in sloughing the Bank’s responsibilities off onto the other two, and (again as Malcolm heard it) onto the FSA.

King seemed almost anxious to maintain that division of labour and responsibility: “The Bank of England is not responsible for individual institutions: we act when the FSA come to us.” And that was King’s other trump: the FSA had not come to the Bank, so the first King knew of the Northern Rock problem was a regular meeting on 14th August.

So, as in the previous and celebrated case of Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom and the Blackpool Zoo:

The Magistrate gave his o-pinion
That no-one was really to blame
He said that he hoped the Ramsbottoms
Would have further sons to their name.

Two conclusions fall out of all this:

• it really is time for a new Banking Act, to sort out Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? That should occupy the time of the Commons for several months.
• the public have a right to know.

In particular, King’s declaration that he would have wanted everything done in secret is not good enough. If it were applied to any business other than banking, any trading other than money, someone would properly be done for insider trading. For weeks Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom were being invited to place their savings in the Northern Rock, which those in the know (notably the TSB, which was being inveigled to take the Rock over) wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole.