Class Difference

Just when we thought there was no significant difference between the Conservatives and the Deputy Conservatives, conclusive proof has been found in the Dominican Republic that they are not at all the same. Some years ago, when the Deputy Conservatives were still posing as liberal democrats, a nice young man named Michael Brown approached them with a gift of just under two and a half million pounds. Brown, who lived in Majorca, swept Charles Kennedy off his feet in much the same way as Lord Ashcroft charmed the metaphorical pants off Daveybloke's current Minister for Burmese Democracy, Willem den Haag. Kennedy was treated to trips on Brown's private jet, while less privileged bigwigs were regaled with tales of public school, St Andrew's University and connections with royalty. One can imagine Daveybloke doing much the same during those heady days between the 2010 general election and the signing of the coalition agreement, burbling of Eton and those charming Windsor people to a besotted Wee Nicky and his chums; and, as with the coalition agreement, at least one side of the Brown-Lib Dem love-in was utilising a certain degree of terminological inexactitude. Brown failed his maths O level, had a City and Guilds in catering and was wanted in Florida for cheque fraud; but despite these qualifications he was not, as he claimed to be, an offshore trader with links to the US embassy, and the money he donated to the Liberal Democrats was stolen. Brown was arrested in 2005 over accusations of a forty-million-pound fraud, and then absconded two and a half years later while awaiting trial for theft, false accounting and perverting the course of justice without the prior consent of the Home Office. He has now been arrested in the Dominican Republic, and therein lies that long-awaited significant difference: the Conservative Party, by and large, is bankrolled by a better class of crook.