The latest Conservative U-turn was desperately needed – but how did we end up here?

Editorial: The prime minister seems to have a particular blind spot on sleaze and appears to think the public neither notice nor care

‘Everyone is a loser, including even the opposition parties, tainted by the general contempt for the political classes’ (PA)

It is difficult to discern anything encouraging in the fate of Owen Paterson, the soon-to-be former MP for North Shropshire, let alone any cause for celebration.

He brought his political demise on himself through paid lobbying, but, given the tragedies in his personal life, his reputational ruin is a sorry spectacle. So, too, is the further damage that it has inflicted on the prestige of the House of Commons. What should have been a routine disciplinary action, with little in the way of wider ramifications, has been turned into a huge political scandal.

Politics, as Mr Paterson has remarked, can be a cruel world. He was, in the end, mere collateral damage from a political ploy that was doomed before it began, and one that may well have been designed to protect the next major figure to be investigated by the independent commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone – the prime minister himself. A “reform” – which is to say, a weakening – of the standards, with, say, recourse to an appeal committee dominated by trusted Conservatives, would have been very convenient. Or it may simply have been that Boris Johnson felt sorry for Mr Paterson.

In any case, it hasn’t worked, and everyone is a loser, including even the opposition parties, tainted by the general contempt for the political classes. We have also had the news that the former Labour (now independent) MP for Leicester East, Claudia Webbe, has been give a suspended sentence for harassment.

Still, politically, it seems that the Conservatives will come off worst from this sorry episode, simply because they are in power. The prime minister appears to have a particular blind spot on sleaze, maybe unsurprisingly, and appears to think that the public neither notice nor care about such allegations, petty or worse.

However, history suggests he is wrong about that, and that allegations of personal misconduct do eventually cause revulsion among the electorate. Often enough, it comes at the end of a long period in power with a weak opposition. The Conservatives’ last experience of sleaze came in the mid-1990s, when they had been in power for well over a decade, and, as now, Labour had lost four elections in a row and seemed far from winning another. The time before that, in the early 1960s, was when the Conservative Macmillan government found itself distracted and exhausted by a run of spy scandals and the Profumo affair, again after about a decade of one-party domination.

Now that the country has again been governed by the Conservatives, or a Conservative-led coalition, for more than a decade, and with Labour usually weak for much of that period, the traditional rot seems to have set in again. When parties think they cannot lose an election, and MPs take safe seats for granted and governments feel they can do as they wish, complacency and malpractice seem to be the inevitable result.

Absent a strong opposition, it is parliament’s own systems, the media and, above all, public intolerance of hypocrisy that prevent MPs from overstepping the mark.