George Foulkes says.."Sleaze"

The public turfed out the last Tory government because of sleaziness; the "Cash for Questions" row and the failure of some back-bench Tory MPs to declare minor gifts or sources of income was too much for the public to stomach and they opted for a Labour government, ignoring Labour's track record of sleaze in local government.

Eleven years on, the Tories' brand of sleaze looks pretty weedy compared to the wholesale corruption practised by the likes of Mandelson Robinson, Irvine, Vaz, Byers, Jo Moore, Milburn, Hughes, Paul Corrigan, and Blair, Jacqui Smith, Myself (Foulkes) and Brown.

That's the big difference - whereas under the Tories there were undeniably some individual back-bench MPs with dodgy agendas of their own, the Labour government is rotten to the core - the cabinet itself; the then Prime Minister himself. Tony Blair was caught red-handedlying to the House of Commons about the £1m contribution Labour accepted from the motor racing industry. It was a defining moment and would easily have been the end of a less slimy politician's career.

In the old days sleaze was about politicians succumbing to the material temptations placed before them, such as expense accounts and foreign travel, or it involved the personal sexual morality or marital fidelity of politicians. There was little or no direct impact on the general public, but the press and opposition politicians worked themselves into a frenzy about it.
New Labour's New Sleaze works the other way round. It is all about the perversion of democratic government; matters of great importance to the public being cooked up behind closed doors, justified by massaged figures, semi-leaked documents and news management. Alarmingly the press seems to be uninterested, and the filthiest government since Lloyd George looks whiter than white!
And now, finally, after leaving 10 Downing Street, Blair regrets attacking the Tories so hard over allegations of "sleaze" in the final years of John Major's government!