Sun Cocaine Hypocrisy

The revelation in yesterday’s Sun on Sunday that Lord Sewel (“Lord Who?”, some may ask) had been filmed taking cocaine and being entertained by prostitutes has got the more moral end of the Fourth Estate in a terribly righteous froth. He has resigned his House of Lords deputy speakership; now there is a clamour for him to be booted out of the upper house altogether. Someone may not have thought this one through.

Photo (c) Natalie Rowe

And not thinking it through was clearly the order of the day at the Mail, which has maximised its coverage of the affair, despite it being another paper’s exclusive. “A peer filmed snorting cocaine with two £200-a-night prostitutes was today facing calls to stand down from the House of Lords. Lord Sewel, 69, was reported to the police and quit as deputy speaker of the Lords after the video emerged”, they observed.

Daily Mail Comment, the authentic voice of the Vagina Monologue, went further: “Sewel has rightly resigned these roles but he should now be stripped of his peerage and the criminal allegations against him investigated by the police. Beyond his disgrace, however, this squalid affair shines a wider spotlight on the disturbingly low calibre of many peers”. Yes, Something Must Be Done. Because, look, it’s written, that’s why.

What does not appear to have occurred to the Dacre doggies, nor to the Murdoch faithful who first ran this story, is that there is rather a lot that we are not being told about Sewel and his, er, recreational pursuits. Did the Sun pay the sex workers involved? Who supplied the cocaine, which, let us not forget, is a Class A drug, and supplying it is therefore an illegal act? We’re not being told, but if the Met gets involved, we may find out.

That may not be to the Sun’s advantage: after all, it was for that paper that Mazher Mahmood was working when a judge called him out for lying and threw out the case against singer Tulisa Contostavlos last year. Was Maz involved in this one? Were any of his associates? And, apart from taking cocaine, exactly what law was being broken by Sewel’s actions? And then there is the right-wing press’ political hypocrisy.

If we’re going to chuck Coke sniffers out of Parliament, then there would be no point stopping at a former Labour junior minister - which is what Sewel was. Any peer or MP who was on record indulging in illegal substances, and using the services of sex workers, would have to go. And first in that queue, it seems, on the balance of evidence, would be the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet.

Osborne has always denied taking cocaine, but the photo taken of him sitting with former dominatrix Natalie Rowe suggests otherwise - as does her recollection. The Mail knows all about the story - they covered it two years ago. So if the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker want to clear out all those “squalid” politicians, they could do worse than start with Osborne, who recently appeared at PMQs looking wasted.

But we’ll have a long time to wait for that, because the right-wing press are hypocrites.