Russell Jones's Week Moment: Zero Days Since the Last Embarrassment
In an exclusive extract from his forthcoming book, 'Tories: The End of an Error', Russell Jones recalls a week in which dizzying levels of Conservative party chaos finally got out of control
It Has Been Zero Days Since the Last Embarrassment
Imagine for a moment that you’re a 78-year-old former Conservative campaign manager, asleep in your bed at 3 am, when suddenly the phone rings and an urgent voice says, ‘I’ve got in with some bad people and they’ve got me locked in a flat and they want £5,000 to release me’.
You explain that you don’t have £5,000 on you at this very moment, what with you being in your nightie and all, so the voice becomes angrier and demands that you immediately leave your house to source a new figure of £6,500, because that’s inflation for you. And then the man on the phone suggests that you take the money from your own life savings, and it’ll all be fine, cos he’ll just secretly steal money from his own campaign funds to repay you.
And then you realise that the voice belongs to your own MP, Mark Menzies.
It had been a long, fraught road for Menzies and his poor constituents in Fylde. In 2014 he’d had to resign from a Government position when it was reported that he’d hired a teenaged Brazilian male sex worker, then given him a private tour of the Palace of Westminster before asking him to procure a big pile of amphetamines.
‘A number of these allegations are not true’, Menzies had insisted while sweating wildly and chewing his own teeth to dust, ‘and I look forward to setting the record straight in due course’. It’s a decade later, and we’re still waiting.
Two years after that incident, he was back in the headlines, this time for a heartwarming story involving a dog, which quickly became less heartwarming when it was alleged he’d almost killed the beast by pouring dangerous amounts of booze into it. Fortunately Menzies was able to clarify the situation to police, who had been called by concerned neighbours. He hadn’t given alcohol poisoning to a dog, he explained; he had merely stood around taking photos while his friend gave alcohol poisoning to a dog, after which the two men got into a pissed-up brawl that spilled out onto the street. And who can expect more from their MP than that? Menzies wasn’t charged, but somebody must have been, because the vet bill for pumping the poor hound’s stomach exceeded £500.
Further problems with intoxicants plagued our hero, when in August 2023 he turned up late and stupefyingly drunk at The Last Night of the Proms, and quickly launched into a kicky, pokey tantrum when he discovered he hadn’t been allocated VIP seats. He maintained that he’d merely struck somebody inadvertently with a flag during an overenthusiastic bout of musical patriotism. But that kind of behaviour is far from rare at the Proms, and security staff aren’t usually called upon to ask you to stop kicking the other patrons’ chairs, as had been the case with the honourable member for Fylde.
It’s not so much a track record as a skid-mark, so you’d expect the Tories to be ready for action whenever a story emerged about Mark Menzies, but you’d be wrong.
Katie Fieldhouse – the 78-year-old woman Menzies had phoned from captivity, perhaps expecting her to launch a Liam Neeson-style takedown of the criminal gang he’d accidentally joined – had informed the Tories about the incident on 3 January, and then the Tories had opted to sit on it for three and a half months. The Conservative Party’s chief of staff had reassured her about Menzies’ latest brush with the law, telling her: ‘It is fraud, but you are not duty-bound to report it because it’s not Conservative Party money’.
Fieldhouse had had enough and went to the papers. She reported that her MP’s behaviour wasn’t a solitary incident, as though any of us really thought it would be. Menzies, she alleged, had previously used £14,000 of political donations to pay his private medical bills.
‘I strongly dispute the allegations put to me’, said Menzies, again.
‘As there is an investigation ongoing, I will not be commenting further’, said Menzies, again.
He resigned the from the party, and he wasn’t alone. Small armies of senior advisors were quitting before the inevitable happened, joining a mad rush to the exits, desperate to land their next job in politics before I Advised The Tories To Cover Up Mark Menzies was added to their CV. At least a dozen MPs had already set up private consultancy firms, keen to start a profitable new career before years of public misbehaviour killed off their previous calling.
‘They are jumping before they are pushed given the terrible outlook for the party’, said an insider. ‘It’s a very sensible thing’.
By this stage, 64 Tory MPs had already announced they were standing down. Another 18 former Tory MPs were also sitting as independents, having lost the whip due to some gobsmacking scandal or other. In fact, so many had been forced to resign that by this point Former Tories outnumbered Liberal Democrats in parliament. And it turns out it was lucrative business, to be so absolutely f**king terrible that you managed to get sacked by a party that still found room for Jonathan Gullis. If a suspended MP could hang on until the General Election, they could each pocket an extra £29,000 in redundancy money.
Such entrepreneurial spirit would normally be right in the Conservative wheelhouse, but the actions of Wragg, Bone, Menzies and company hadn’t gone down entirely well with their remaining colleagues. A senior cabinet minister described the behaviour of his own party as ‘utter madness’, and pondered, ‘Do we really reflect society as a whole? I hope not for the sake of humanity’.
But many Tory MPs still seemed mystified by the actions of people who had sat next to them on the green benches for over a decade, even when those actions had been widely reported in the press. I guess this is what you get when you only read The Telegraph, a publication that was by now entirely dedicated to the shocking news that a woman had legally bought her own house with her own money, which she hadn’t even stolen from donations.
‘How can somebody possibly get a dog pissed?’, asked one Tory backbencher, startled by the novel experience of coming face-to-face with a verifiable fact. Another sagely noted, ‘There have been so many other mad things that we’d forgotten that it happened’.
It seemed the only part of the British economy that had become more productive under the Tories was Number 10’s crisis management team. As the ‘Mark Menzies Kidnapped Himself’ story ate up bandwidth in a news cycle that was struggling to cope, a quarter of Grant Shapps turned up on TV to remind us that, ‘Just because an accusation is made, or something is written, doesn’t mean it is necessarily proven’, which must have come as a shock to the swarm of Telegraph journalists traducing Angela Rayner.
All of this went down brilliantly with a Conservative Party readying itself for local elections in early May. Some faint hope remained amongst the more dementedly optimistic Tories – not of electoral triumph, obviously, but at least that they might avoid complete disaster. However, as even the most ardent of the party’s romantic dreamers pointed out, ‘You can’t rule out a complete panicked meltdown’.
They had no positive story to present to voters, so had focused entirely on negative attacks on Labour, but it seemed to no avail. A cabinet minister privately remarked: ‘The issue we have is that even if we land a hit [on Labour], we get one or two days out of it until it’s wiped out by something else. It’s like those workplace signs: “0 days since the last crisis”.’
It was Rishi Sunak’s worst week to date.
Tories: The End of an Error is available for pre-order from Byline Books, click here.
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