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Time’s up for Vaz
Now that the Parliamentary Standards Committee has concluded that the allegedly sick Keith Vaz is restored to health, we hope it can get a move on in investigating his predilection for rent boys. He has, after all, been happily, and by all accounts healthily, swanning around the world while his case has been put on hold.
There never was, with the possible exception of Cyril Smith, a grosser example of a parliamentarian letting that august institution, his constituents and most of all his wife and family, down. The jury in this case can hardly be said to be out when there is video evidence to confirm the whole squalid affair.
Here is a middle-aged man who was assiduous in cultivating a caring, wholly decent image of himself while habitually engaging with young men barely out of their teens for sex. It’s ironic that the young men captured in the recordings were from the same country, Romania, that Vaz rushed to welcome off the plane in 2014 in that much-publicised photo op.
Every aspect of the case appals. The sex was unprotected so that, in selfishly gratifying himself, Vaz put at risk of life-threatening disease his unsuspecting wife. He lied about who he was, passing himself off as Jim, an industrial washing machine salesman. Then, in what I believe to be a serious criminal offence, he encouraged the youngsters to obtain Class A drugs, even offering to pay for them – as long as they hurried up as he declared himself anxious in the recordings to “get the party started”. That, in my book, is known as aiding and abetting.
Most of us want to believe that our parliamentary representatives are high-minded and honourable people. Certainly they like to be addressed as such. But what are we to make of a situation when, against all expectations, following the shocking revelations concerning him that weekend, Vaz nonchalantly and brazenly waltzed into the chamber of the House of Commons the next working day as though nothing had happened. Equally shocking was the reception he received. Instead of a hushed, disbelieving House, there were words of consolation and even back-patting. Were these from understanding and perhaps like-minded colleagues?
Vaz’s smarmy, polished mode of delivery speaks of someone anxious to be thought a thoroughly establishment, Anglicised figure. Unusually for someone born into a Muslim family, his father chose a galaxy of non-Muslim first names. Did dad think that his little boy would more easily gain acceptance by being called Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz? It’s clear Keith never felt any embarrassment as he carried the pretentions and posturing to new heights with his obsessive grandstanding, networking and search for the photo op.
Vaz represents a constituency with one of the highest proportion of Muslims in Britain, Leicester East. In the light of this new scandal, how do his constituents square their faith with their unwillingness to deselect an MP who has betrayed them so outrageously?
And let’s not forget that, as Vaz was engaging in sordid, illegal activities, he was chairing the House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs while it was considering changes to the law relating to prostitution and drugs. Was there ever a case more screaming for the Mother of Parliaments to divest itself of an individual who has brought it into such disrepute? Judging from the welcome Vaz received that Monday morning in the Commons, it seems not.
As for that not-small-matter of the police ignoring prima facie evidence of ‘Aiding and Abetting’ a crime, is it that they’re running scared of going after a high-profile figure, especially if he’s not white, a Muslim and an MP? Does Vaz enjoy the same kind of immunity that has served rogue elements of his fellow Muslims so well in the sex grooming scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford and Telford (and who knows where else)?
Amazingly, in view of all the many shenanigans of recent times starting with the expenses scandal, we still want to hold onto that long-standing belief that British parliamentarians are a cut above the rest: men and women with the highest of principles who believe in setting an example. But how can we hold onto these hopes when such a character as Vaz is still not only tolerated, but welcomed and indulged in parliament as “the Honourable Member for Leicester East”?
We are currently embarked on a route and branch investigation of sexual abuse in all its forms. We are also determined, once and for all, to deal with sexual exploitation of women and men in the workplace. One gets the impression that parliament would like, in its own case, for this nasty, criminal business concerning Vaz to go away. But we must not allow it. The man has taken us all for fools. We have allowed him to stretch the limits of our patience to an extraordinary extent. The time is long overdue to stop indulging him. The police should reopen its file, his Leicester East constituency party should examine itself and Parliament should get on with booting Vaz out.
Police aid Vaz and his MP chums to stick two fingers up to the rest of us
We deserve so much better than slippery Keith Vaz.
What are we to make of the police’s decision not to proceed against the former Minister of State for Europe and ex-chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee?
The police dropped their investigation into Labour MP Keith Vaz, known to his parliamentary colleagues and the wider public as “Vazeline” for his extraordinary ability to extricate himself from any hole, despite his behaviour clearly being reprehensible in the extreme and questionable as to its legality.
One of the things which most shocked us about the MPs’ expenses scandal was the sheer mean-spiritedness and hypocrisy of it all. Here were lawmakers happy to break the law even in the most mundane and petty of matters. All the time they wanted the rest of us to hold them in high esteem and believe them virtuous. That, indeed, is what we wanted to believe and the reason we were so shocked. We wanted to feel that they represented the best of our country: men and women whose examples we should strive to emulate.
All this is what draws me back to Keith Vaz, a man whose whole career has been mired in a succession of questionable activities. This last episode concerning rent boys is only the latest. Vaz is a man puffed up beyond belief who thinks nothing of intruding on private grief to gain publicity for himself or doing all manner of weird and wonderful things to get into our newspapers and onto our small screens (remember him turning up at Luton airport to welcome Romanian arrivals on the day they could seek work in Great Britain?). Yet for all his grandstanding, ingratiating behaviour – particularly to speaker Bercow whom he relies on to give him excessive Commons airtime – and smarmy talk he is held in the highest esteem by his parliamentary colleagues.
On the very first sitting of his Commons chums following those sensational disclosures concerning drugs and rent boys, he was warmly received when he waltzed in as though nothing had happened. Brazenness cannot begin to describe such an entrance. There were mutterings of sympathy and even back-slapping by various of his colleagues. Indeed, the whole atmosphere seemed resonant of a witch-hunt by a pitiless media out to destroy a good man.
One could almost be forgiven for thinking that many in that chamber may themselves have shared Vaz’s predilection for rent boys.
Few of us will ever have witnessed such a shameful and squalid performance by members who like to address one another other as “Honourable”. For all that, I do not believe that any one of the other 649 members would have had the effrontery to show themselves on that particular day. But this is Vaz. Having bare-facedly brazened it out in the Commons so soon after the story broke, it was to be expected that he would do the same a few weeks later at Labour’s annual party conference. And so he did. It will be interesting to see if his Leicester East constituents show their distaste for the way he has let them, and above all their faith, down by pricking his massive bubble of self-esteem and deselecting him.
As news of the scandal broke, Vaz was Chair of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee which recently had been deliberating on prostitution. That conflict of interest in his febrile moment of exposure was too much even for Vazeline to escape. He stood down.
But squalid and undignified as his exploitation of young, vulnerable rent boys was, something even worse was revealed. At the very time he was heading up the committee investigating harm caused by illegal Class A drugs, he solicited a Romanian prostitute to trot off and bring back some Class A drugs. He even offered to pay for them. Now, if that doesn’t constitute criminal activity I’d like to know what does. Isn’t “aiding and abetting” a crime? Vaz was complicit both before and after the fact. The whole affair was confirmed by video footage – prima facie evidence if ever there was. (Vaz’s wealth has long been a matter of public curiosity. He is rich beyond what his parliamentary stipend would suggest and it would be interesting to learn where his unaccounted for wealth comes from.)
Shameless Vaz, with amazing sangfroid, sees absolutely nothing untoward about what he has done to his family, the House of Commons and the wider public. Incredibly, within weeks of stepping down as Chair of the Home Affair Select Committee he put himself forward for the Justice Select Committee. Did this prove too much, or at least too soon, even for his normally indulgent parliamentary chums? You bet it didn’t. Now he’s back pontificating in his own inimical, self-important way on what is just and what is not. Pomposity begins and ends with Vaz. To use a clichéd but in this case totally justified phrase, you really couldn’t make it up.
Am I alone in thinking that Vaz’s parliamentary colleagues, by continuing to indulge his fantasies, display a huge contempt for what the rest of us think?
The police must re-examine the evidence. Are they afraid of the establishment? Do they need to be dead like Janner and Savile before they will act? Perhaps it is that same kind of reluctance which caused them to hold back for so long in the Rotherham grooming of young girls; maybe Vaz’s faith and ethnicity has acted as a protective shield. That, perhaps – and the establishment’s own efforts to defend one of their own – may explain why this most terrible of scandals has slipped below the radar.
Brexit, Cameron’s demise, Trump, Europe’s travails and, most of all, the terrible tragedy unfolding in Syria have all fortuitously come to Vaz’s aid by moving the spotlight away from him. No better time, from the police’s point of view, to bury bad news.
Are we to stand by and let Vazeline get away with it again? For all our sakes we must hope not. Our Mother of Parliaments deserves better than that. The one I feel most sorry for in all this is Vaz’s poor wife. He felt so little love for her that he thought nothing of endangering her life by having unprotected sex with a male prostitute.
Quite apart from the scandal of no police action, with all this and more known by his ‘honourable’ parliamentary colleagues and the institution of parliament being brought into disrepute in a serious infringement of its rulebook, how is it that he has not been suspended from the Commons?
The Last Foundling 