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Crown Passage17/11/2011
Wanting Honour

Olive, o Olive

Had a Labour cabinet member casually, arrogantly and incompetently done what Oliver Letwin has repeatedly done with private and public correspondence, the screech from the tribalists would have been deafening. And it would have been right. Oliver Letwin should have resigned on being caught – it could have gone without saying that having habitually behaved thus, Letwin has no genuine, truthful conception of having done anything wrong – and David Cameron should have sacked him upon his failing to have offered his resignation. That neither man feels likewise about Letwin’s offence tells you all you need to know about the class of man currently governing us. There really is one rule for them and another one for the rest of us. A civil servant for one who behaved likewise could not expect to receive the same sort of complicit indulgence from his ministerial masters. This is rotten politics, and the Right’s lack of outrage at it speaks poorly about us. Almost the worst thing Cameron is doing to the Conservative party is his making hypocrites of the rest of us too.