Delicious farce of greed and conceit

David Sexton
1 Feb 2008

The Conway story gets better and better. Now we learn that the disgraced Bexley and Sidcup MP has also been employing a friend of his son rejoicing in the name of Michel Pratte. Marvellous!

Meanwhile it turns out that his prize prat of a son, Henry - who appears to have received £32,000 of public money for doing nothing much at all - has been claiming the title of "Queen Sloane" for himself. And Queen Sloane recently organised an event at a Chelsea nightclub called the "F*** Off I'm Rich Party". It would be hard for any satirist to improve on that for perfect nastiness. It makes waving wads of notes and shouting loadsamoney! look like antique courtesy. Let us remember that it is we, the taxpayers who unwittingly financed this card, who are being so roundly addressed there.

And then there are the pictures. The gormless conceit of the Conway family on their Christmas card is treasurable. While Mr Conway looks faintly uneasy, as well he might, knowing how he had bankrolled this lot, the younger Conways radiate the cheery complacency that distinguishes the dim and over-entitled. It isn't quite bovine or porcine - that's unfair to farm stock. It's all too human.

The party pix of Queen Sloane are even more captivating. Would any cartoonist have dared to portray this twerp prancing about with not just a fake fur but an actual model of a peacock pinned to his foolish head? He managed such an arrangement himself, though.

If you were the sympathetic type, you could find a little family tragedy here. Derek Conway was educated at a comprehensive in Gateshead but sent his sons to Harrow to acquire this gloss. Funding it illicitly has now cost him his career.

But let's neither feel sympathy for Derek Conway nor be prepared to forget. David Cameron acted quickly to eject him from the Conservative Party and doubtless hopes the embarrassment will soon evaporate (Old Etonians often find arrivistes embarrassing, I understand).

But we owe it to ourselves to remember the Conways. We should keep their fatuous faces ever before us, perhaps printed on T-shirts or beermats, as a handy reminder that class war is still being earnestly waged, in Parliament itself. The Conways represent the Conservative Party just as much as smoothie Cameron, perhaps more truly even.

Then again, they are also richly emblematic of MPs of all parties, with their £144, 927 allowances commonly distributed among their own families, and their stout resistance to any reform of their privileges. There's a fine Russian proverb: Give the trough and the pigs will appear. That's a concise yet comprehensive description of the current-system prevailing at Westminster. The Conways have helped not just to reveal that but thrust it unignorably in our faces. Not entirely a wasted career after all, perhaps, Mr Conway's.