Mark Menzies Affair: If This is The Mother of All Parliaments, She Must be Blushing with Embarrassment

Mark Menzies Resigns Tory Whip: Another Tale of Sleaze and Corruption in Westminster

If this is the mother of all parliaments, she must be blushing with embarrassment at her horde of degenerate children. Mark Menzies resigns the Tory whip after the party opens an investigation into claims he misused campaign funds.

The circumstances surrounding the misuse are ambiguous at best, but just scratching the surface leaves a sticking residue under the nails you know will take some scrubbing to remove.

The Times broke the story of how Mark Menzies, MP for Fylde, was under investigation over allegations that he misused campaign funds and abused his position after making a late-night phone call saying he’d been locked up by “bad people” who were demanding thousands of pounds.

According to the Times, Mr Menzies, who represents Fylde, in Lancashire, rang an elderly local party volunteer at 3.15 am in December, saying he was locked in a flat and needed £5,000 as a matter of “life and death.” The sum, which rose to £6,500, was paid by his office manager from her personal bank account and subsequently reimbursed from campaign funds raised from donors.

£14,000 given by donors for use on Tory campaign activities had previously been transferred to Menzies’s personal bank account and used for his private medical expenses.

The Conservative Party has been aware of the allegations of potential fraud for more than three months and has taken no action.

Sordid Affairs of Westminster: Examining the Mark Menzies Scandal

Locked up by ‘bad people’

The phone call came in the dead of night. “Are you on your own?” the man said, with urgency in his voice. “I’ve got in with some bad people, and they’ve got me locked in a flat, and they want £5,000 to release me.”

The caller was Mark Menzies, 52, the Conservative MP for Fylde in Lancashire.

He had rung his 78-year-old former campaign manager, a woman who The Times is not naming, waking her from her sleep to ask her to hand over thousands of pounds from a bank account containing donations to the MP’s campaign.

She told Menzies that it was 3.15 am, and she couldn’t transfer any money without leaving the house. He became angry, allegedly telling her it was “a matter of life and death,” and demanding she instead lend him the money from her own savings, according to an account she has subsequently given to friends and the Conservative Party.

The woman refused and told the MP that she would speak to his long-time constituency office manager, Shirley Green, in the morning. A few hours later, Green stumped up the money, telling local Tories that she had cashed in her Isa to do so. By then, the sum demanded had risen to £6,500.

Later that day, having been ‘rescued’ from the flat in which he had been detained, Menzies rang the 78-year-old again.

He told her that he had summoned one of his staffers to London to collect him from the flat. On arrival, the junior staffer handed over his own money, a sum thought to be a few hundred pounds, which Menzies said he owed to two other men.

Asked if he was concerned he could be blackmailed again, Menzies said he would change his phone number.

The following day, on another call, it was alleged Menzies said that he needed another £35,000 for medical bills.

Told there was no more money in the campaign funds bank account, Menzies was unperturbed. “Oh, we’ll raise some more,” he allegedly replied.

A source close to Menzies said the MP had met a man on an online dating website and gone to the man’s flat, before subsequently going with another man to a second address where he continued drinking. He was sick at one point, and several people at the address demanded £5,000, claiming it was for cleaning up and other expenses.

The source said Menzies decided to pay them because he was scared of what would happen otherwise, but did not have the funds to transfer the money from his own savings. His aides gave him money “as friends who wanted to help.”

A Damning Indictment of Westminster’s Integrity

Thousands in campaign funds

Green was reimbursed the £6,500 she gave Menzies in December from funds donated by local supporters to cover the MP’s campaign expenses.

The money was in an account with the name Fylde Westminster Group and was set up as a local business group to allow supporters to donate to Menzies.

A source close to Menzies said that he had offered to repay this sum, but claimed local Tories controlling the account said he did not need to.

The practice of setting up a local business group is common among MPs because donors do not have to declare a donation to the Conservative Party in company accounts, and donors are not publicly declared at all until they reach a certain threshold. It was used to raise funds for his campaigning activities and was administered by his former campaign manager and by Green, his office manager.

The money used to repay Green was not the first time that this campaign fund was used to cover Menzies’s personal expenses.

Four years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, Menzies called his former campaign manager seeking £3,000 from the campaign funds, she has told friends.

He claimed to have personal medical bills due urgently that he could not pay and promised to sell some shares to repay the money. The former campaign manager and Green authorized the transfer, and Menzies received it.

But the MP is understood never to have repaid the money. Instead, he asked for and received a further sum of £4,000.

In 2014 Mark Menzies resigned as ministerial aide following allegations by Brazilian rent boy.

At the time a statement was issued. He said: “I have decided to resign as a PPS after a series of allegations were made against me in a Sunday newspaper.

“A number of these allegations are not true and I look forward to setting the record straight in due course.”

Fylde Conservative Association chairman Councillor Brenda Ackers said: “Mark has the full support of his constituency party.”

Of course, we will never get to the bottom of this sordid affair; it will be boxed, packaged, and shoved down the memory hole with all the other sleaze put out into the public domain that is no longer useful for leverage by the whips.

We ask who or what these people serve other than their own little perversions.

This is yet another depressing tale of sleaze and corruption festering in the heart of Westminster. An MP abusing his position and donors’ trust for personal gain, enabled by a party machine more concerned with sweeping scandals under the rug than upholding basic standards of integrity.

As the tawdry details emerge, one can’t help but feel a sense of resignation and disgust. Here we have a sitting member of parliament allegedly caught in compromising situations, misusing funds, and engaging in shakedowns – all while the supposed “mother of parliaments” averts her eyes.

It begs the question: who do these people really serve? Certainly not their constituents nor any notion of the public good. Just their own bottomless appetite for indulgence and decadence, satiated by the spoils of office.

This rotten MPs’ racket has become so brazen, so commonplace, that it strains credulity. One is reminded of the Supreme Court justice’s infamous quip about pornography – you know corruption when you see it. And in the case of Westminster, we’re bombarded by the most lurid examples daily.

What a damning indictment of the British political establishment that scandals like this are frequent enough to elicit little more than weary shrugs. As if we’ve been inoculated through prolonged exposure to the moral depths these people are capable of plumbing.

So let the Party machine do what it does best – circle the wagons, obfuscate, minimize. Another few months and this sordid tale too will vanish from the headlines, swallowed by the media’s infinite maw and the public’s waning attention span.

All that’ll remain is the bitter aftertaste of that age-old question: When the pillars of democracy have rotted from within, what’s left to uphold? Perhaps it’s we who should be blushing at our own complicity in fueling this venal caricature of governance.

Perverted Parliamentarians: Roll Call of Accused or Convicted MPs

A question arises when we ask, are we surprised by the latest scandalous gossip swirling around our Parliaments? Hardly. These places have become little better than a tax-payer-funded brothel for dissolute MPs to indulge their sordid appetites.

The roll call of Tory reprobates hauled before the courts reads like a pervert’s Almanac. From gropers and flashers to rapists and stalkers, a parade of pathetic miscreants has sullied the party’s name. Not that Labour’s po-faced Puritans fare much better when their own tawdry secrets surface.

Some of the Accused or Convicted Conservative MPs:

1. Charlie Elphicke: Former MP for Dover, convicted in 2020 of three counts of sexual assault against two women.
2. Imran Ahmad Khan: Former MP for Wakefield, convicted in 2022 of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy.
3. Neil Parish: MP for Tiverton and Honiton, admitted to watching porn in the House of Commons.
4. David Warburton: MP for Somerton and Frome, facing allegations from three women.
5. Rob Roberts: Former MP for Delyn, found to have sexually harassed a junior staff member.
6. Andrew Griffiths: Former MP, resigned in 2019 after sending sexually explicit messages to constituents and allegations of rape by his wife in family proceedings.

Accused or Convicted Labour MPs:

1. Mike Hill: Former MP for Hartlepool, resigned in 2021 after an employment tribunal upheld allegations of sexual harassment.
2. John Woodcock: Former MP for Barrow and Furness, left Labour amid sexual harassment claims.
3. Kelvin Hopkins: Former MP for Luton North, faced allegations of inappropriate physical contact and harassment in 2017.
4. Geraint Davies: Former MP, lost the party whip over sexual harassment allegations.
5. Christian Matheson: Former MP, resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct.
6. Keith Vaz: Former MP, suspended for offering to buy cocaine for male escorts after a drug and sex probe.
7. Clive Lewis: MP for Norwich South, cleared of sexual harassment allegations in 2017.

Other Political Figures:

1. Lord Ahmed of Rotherham: Former Labour peer, convicted of child sex offences.
2. Patrick Grady: SNP MP, resigned as the party’s chief whip in Westminster amid allegations of sexual harassment.
3. Derek MacKay: Former Scottish finance minister, forced to resign in 2020 after stalking a 16-year-old boy.

Such spectacles leave the public rightfully nauseated. Debating policy by day while leching after staff by night, these preening narcissists have dragged British politics into the gutter. Their private warped proclivities are matched only by their arrogant sense of entitlement.

Have we forgotten these so-called lawmakers are meant to represent the people, not repulse them with their tawdry antics? Westminster has become a cesspit of amorality where decency and probity go to die.

As the rotten boughs continue to fall from the withering tree of the British state, we must demand an accounting, a radical reformation of a system that perpetuates and protects such malignant elements. For too long, the privileged few have indulged their personal proclivities while immiserating the many. Enough is enough. A moral and political revolution is long overdue.