School for Scandal

British intrigues typically involve sex or spies. Now, the Parliament expense scandal threatens to be as corrosive as anything seen in Britain for decades.

By ALISTAIR MACDONALD and STEPHEN FIDLER
WSJ

The Mother of Parliaments has always been, in truth, a lady of somewhat questionable virtue. Though the British like to think of their House of Commons as the very model of parliamentary democracy, its members, the elected tribunes of the people, have frequently fallen short of those high British ideals of decorum, dignity and probity.

For the British, by turns prurient and puritan, sex is the usual temptation. In the last half a century, the course of British politics has been diverted by tales of a Cabinet minister who fathered a daughter out of wedlock, a leader of a party accused of murdering a homosexual lover, a minister, who, press reports said at the time, liked to dress up in the uniform of his favorite soccer team while she pleasured him, and countless other lurid stories of libidinous excess.

The transgressions were, for the most part venial rather than venal in nature. Occasionally the tittering glee and clucking disapproval that accompanied these episodes was replaced with expressions of grave concern for the national interest, as in 1963 when the defense minister John Profumo admitted to having an affair with a prostitute who happened to be sleeping at the time with a Russian spy. But generally the British parliamentary scandal has been as much entertainment as indictment.

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