Tory sleaze is back and it will cost them – just as it did in the Nineties

Tory sleaze was the dominant force for my early adolescence, writes Katy Brand, and this sense that rottenness goes hand in hand with political ambition has never quite left me

Owen Paterson resigned as an MP this week following lobbying allegations (Getty)

I remember very clearly the day Margaret Thatcher resigned. It was November 1990, and I was 11 years old. I was sitting on a coach going from my school in Hertfordshire up to London to sing in a commemorative church service with the choir. The coach driver had the radio on, and the announcement was gravely made over the airways. I was up front, as I liked to be, and I heard it clearly. I turned to my somewhat nonplussed school mates and said with eyes wide, “Thatcher’s resigned!” Yes, I was a bit of a weirdo wonk even then.

But what I remember feeling was fear too, because although she was generally referred to in my family as “that wicked woman”, she was also all I had ever known. I was born a few months before she came into office as prime minister, and my whole life to that point had been dominated by Thatcher’s ideology and policies: it was every person for themselves, or at most for the protection of your family unit. It was about loosening credit restrictions so you had more money in your pocket, or at least more of someone else’s money. It was about owning your home and selling off council stock. It was about there being “no such thing as society”. It was not a happy time for me.

But my childlike fear was that something else would come in her place, and it would be even worse. And in some ways it was – a now legendary procession of Tory sleazebags dominated the news between 1990 and 1995, before the Nolan Report into ministerial standards was finally published to try to put the genie back in the bottle. Even though they had long ago lost the bottle top, at least the bad behaviour could be temporarily controlled before it seeped back out again.

It was a time of tabloid hilarity in my mind, too. It was David Mellor with his sexy young mistress doing the deed in a Chelsea football strip. It was Neil Hamilton who already looked like he was dissolving at his edges being busted for taking cash for questions. It was Jonathan Aitken spending undeclared nights at the Ritz, later jailed alongside his “sword of truth” for perjury. It was Jeffrey Archer, accused of insider trading, the charges later dropped due to “insufficient evidence”. It felt relentless.

And finally, though John Major seemed a decent enough man, the public had had enough. Tory sleaze was everywhere, and then along came John Smith followed by Tony Blair and the country had a viable option again, and a road to recovery from Thatcherism.

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Tory sleaze was the dominant force for my early adolescence though. The idea that they all had their hands either in the till or someone else’s knickers, or possibly both at the same time, was pervasive. The news told us every day that you couldn’t trust a Tory, and though I lived in a fairly conservative area, the natural rebellious nature of all young people was to dismiss them with a roll of the eyes. And that’s what we did, no matter how our parents or grandparents voted. It felt like everything was rotten, irredeemably rotten, and more dangerous than that: inevitably rotten.

This sense that rottenness goes hand in hand with political ambition has never quite left me, and I think that is true of others of my generation. We took it all in and perhaps now those disastrous 1990s years are partly responsible for the general malaise that seems a feature of the domestic political landscape in the UK. “Who cares? They’re all the same anyway,” is a phrase you will hear time and again whenever a news crew pokes a stick mic at a person on a busy high street.

They’re not all the same, but as it was in the mid-Nineties, it is now the job of the opposition parties to prove that beyond doubt. The Owen Paterson debacle has given Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet the ideal opportunity to pile on the pressure. The Conservative Party is finally feeling, like in 1995, that perhaps the dung beetle has overreached itself and the ball of dung it is pushing up the hill is too heavy and too dense, and a critical mass has once again been reached where it rolls back and crushes the beetle beneath. You can decide who is the beetle in this scenario, and I mean no disrespect to dung beetles here who I understand are rather diligent and conscientious creatures.

I hope this does prove to be a tipping point. I hope the opposition parties work together to take another MP off the Tories at the North Shropshire by-election. I hope once again I can turn wide-eyed after hearing an announcement on the radio and say, “Johnson’s resigned!”