Having been sat the last three hours in a lounge at Stansted, with a Sky News screen in front of me, it has been fascinating to watch them six times cover the Grant Shapps resignation and never mention the word sex. It was all apparently just about “office bullying.” There has also been some pontification about why, over Shapps and Coulson, Cameron is such a bad judge of people.
Two things from Cameron’s background explain it very simply – neither mentioned by Sky News.
The first is that Cameron went to the type of school where for senior males to bully, blackmail or otherwise coerce junior males into sex was not particularly abnormal behaviour.
The second is that he comes from a background where you can smash up a restaurant at a Bullingdon Club function and have daddy’s cheque book buy off the trouble, or you can stick your todger in a pig’s mouth. Because you are privileged and the normal rules of social behaviour do not apply to you. Nobody will ever query the cocaine at your Chipping Norton house parties. If you are one of the group, there is an expectation of impunity and the group is confident it can defend its Coulsons, Feldmans and Shapps.
It is confident because, in the scores of incidents we don’t get to hear about, it succeeds in doing so.