Lies, posturing, defections, elections and resignations

So it is the conference season again, oh joy.

The Labour conference passed by with little comment apart from the fact Ed Milliband forgot his lines and subsequently didn't mention the deficit.

We had better luck with the Tory one which kicked off in much more interesting way, two weekend's ago. First of all we had an MP who nobody had ever heard of - Brooks Newmark, the 56 year old MP for Braintree in Essex. He resigned when it emerged that he had sent a 21 year old Tory public relations "girl" a picture of himself, which was described as "explicit" in the press. I haven't seen this picture myself but he is apparently only wearing the top half of his pyjamas! For this he will go down as a sad episode in Tory history, his wife and his five children haven't said what they think.

In a further irony, Mr Newmark was the Minister for Civil Society who were campaigning to get more women involved in politics.

I tell a lie, we have heard of him, he's the pillock who agreed when asked a question: "that charities should stick to their knitting and stay out of politics".

It used to be said that the Tories were always involved in sex scandals and the Labour Party scandals always involved money. The situation clearly isn't that black and white nowadays.

Then there was another defection to UKIP.

I remember the referendum in 1975 to join what was then called the Common Market and the Tories have been arguing bitterly about it ever since, that's nearly 40 years!

Nigel Farage knows this - he's older than me and he's been playing on this ever since he was one of the founding members of UKIP in September 1993.

I don't think I know any Tories but I can only think this is their standard Pavlovian response to Johnny Foreigner and the fact that the EU costs an absolute fortune. Let's face it we all know that whole chunks of EU infrastructure that are a profligate waste of money.

It would be utter madness to come out of the EU - it may cost an arm and a leg to run and wastes money hand over fist but the UK and the EU are gigantic trading partners. The most recent figures I can find on the HMRC website are for the month of July 2014. We, the UK, imported goods from EU to the tune of £19.6 billion for that month. We sold goods to EU countries to the tune of £12.3 billion for that month. Although these figures fluctuate they have remained consistent for the last 18 months. OK so there is a trade deficit but whichever way you look at it these figures amount to an awful lot of jobs on both sides of the English Channel.

So the other bit of news that came out the weekend of the Tory conference was that a Tory MP defected to UKIP, this is another MP we've never heard of; Mark Reckless, He is well known as a Eurosceptic. After his defection to UKIP, this poor soul has had to move himself and his family; he is married and has two children, to a secret location. According to Nigel Farage "this is because he has been subjected to really unpleasant, nasty, abuse."

As far as I can tell, or it's maybe just wishful thinking on my part but is the Tory Party in trouble? Eight Tory MPs who got elected in 2010 have already indicated that they will not be standing in next year's election. Louise Mensch has buggered off to America, to write and look after her family. She was also elected in 2010. Boris has already started jostling to place himself in an ideal position to stand to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. UKIP are on the way up and will damage the Tories more than the Labour Party, although I think  they will make inroads into both.

My thanks go to my friend Suzanne Cowling who pointed out to me that it was Brooks Newmark who made the snide remark about charities.