Labour’s two-tier scandal could finally bury the special relationship
The Labour party’s cack-handed attempt at interference in the US presidential election has much more serious ramifications than the initial revelations.
Political scandals come in two varieties. The first is the straightforward discovery of chicanery exercised in a particular context, with an evident nefarious purpose, by perpetrators exposed to public scrutiny. The second is a two-tier scandal which, at first, appears to belong to the category already described, but on closer scrutiny turns out to have a further dimension, with more serious ramifications than the initial revelations.
The Profumo affair was an example of this second category. Initially, it appeared to be a conventional sex scandal, involving a married government minister and a poule de luxe, aggravated by the minister’s lying to the House of Commons. However, from the perspective of the intelligence community, the fact that the said luxury chicken had also been sharing her bed with a senior Soviet agent, while her British lover was the Secretary of State for War, lent a much more sinister aspect to the Feydeau farce that this classic tale of Tory dalliance originally resembled.