It’s an amazing unfolding story about Paul Flowers, the Methodist minister, the ex-Labour councillor forced to resign over inappropriate behaviour, the ex-Co-op Bank chairman who had no credible banking experience, and then being serial drug-user and user of rent boys.
While the revelations are deeply damaging to the Co-operative Group, and the Co-operative Bank, and the Labour Party, they are equally deeply embarrassing for the nation.
That our bank oversight and regulation is so weak that someone like Paul Flowers can be entrusted to run a high street bank is surely cause for national shame.
I’m in agreement with Charles Moore in The Spectator that it neither speaks well of our press and media, apart from the Daily Mail, who’ve signally failed to uncover these sordid details before, nor of what Moore calls the ‘rotten heart of the Labour movement’.
How pained must those upstanding and loyal Labour supporters feel about this. Although change will be promised no doubt. Where there’s politics involved there’s skulduggery too, as Tony Blair observed. So change will be an illusion.
