There’s something murky going on with Lord Lester. No, we don’t know either but this claim in The Times is very odd indeed:
Lord offered campaigner peerage in return for sex
Well, just not quite how these things work.
Ms Sanghera, a campaigner against forced marriage, worked closely with the human rights barrister in 2006 on the passage of a parliamentary bill. At the time he was 70 and she was 41.
An investigation found that Lord Lester persistently groped and made sexual comments towards her, offered her a “corrupt inducement” to become his mistress and threatened “unspecified consequences” if she refused him.
Entirely true that a man might offer anything at all if he thought he might get his end away. But it’s not actually true that a peer gets to decide who the other peers are going to be. We’d probably want to have a little think about it if a Page 3 girl got to the red benches while still in her 20s. Or even if her child did so from birth. And what is it that we would be talking about?
Well, that that’s the privilege of Kings, isn’t it? As the first Duke of Grafton, 1st Duke of Monmouth, 1st Duke of Northumberland, 1st Earl of Plymouth, first Duke of Richmond, 1st Duke of St Albans might remind us.
And if that were happening we’d probably like to have a little word with Charlie, wouldn’t we?
And now to the important question. Why did one of them only get that Earldom?
At the time, Lord Lester was a Lib-Dem (even they’ve now cast him out) and on the panel making their recommendations for (preposterously inflated numbers of) new peers. So it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he could have delivered on his offer.
At the time, Lord Lester was a Lib-Dem (even they’ve now cast him out) and on the panel making their recommendations for (preposterously inflated numbers of) new peers. So it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he could have delivered on his offer.