Non-Londoners may have missed a diverting interview with Henry Conway in the Evening Standard today.
Conway's father, Derek, you may recall, was the Tory MP who had the whip removed in January after employing his sons to do office work that the Commons standards watchdog ruled they only partly carried out.
"I think part of what kicked off the whole expenses thing was the interest in us," Henry tells the Standard. The scandal predated the wider MPs' expenses furore by two years. But Henry backs Sir Christopher Kelly's recent proposals to ban MPs from employing family members.
Judging by what happened to us, it's probably a very sensible thing … There should be nothing wrong with family members working for an MP if it's all above board and you're doing the work, as I was, but I can also see that from this moment on, with the extraordinary [expenses saga] fresh in everyone's mind, it's probably quite sensible to ban it.
He also suggests that his father's misdemeanour – which led to the Old Bexley and Sidcup MP, who will stand down at the next election, being ordered to pay back nearly £17,000 – were "really insignificant ... compared with what other [MPs] have apparently done".
Henry says:
There was this great, enormous inquiry into us, but we're small beer, really. I think there is a certain amount of double-standards going on, but that's politics. It's quite a cut-throat game, and at least I now know I don't want to go into it.
That's a shame, as Conway – a flamboyantly dressed nightclub host and fashion "muse" who has become a minor celebrity since the story broke – could perhaps have a future as an entertaining political toff in the mould of Boris Johnson. He also uses the interview to promote The Henry, a £350 men's waistcoat he co-created; discuss his club night ("It's just about the dressing-up; it's not like we're killing kittens or anything"); and note that the so-called Notting Hill set, whose most famous members are David and Samantha Cameron, are "not that keen on the Conway name at the moment". Would the Tory leader and his wife ever come to his club? Probably not.
