The peer claims he had previously entertained more than a dozen other women at his luxury apartment, before paying the escorts £200 each – one in cash and one with a cheque drawn on his personal Bank of Scotland account.
We’re being told it was £200 a night. Which in London would get you something about as attractive as the back end of a Routemaster.
£200 an hour, a session, maybe: but if it was for the night then obviously he should go just on the basic grounds of bad taste.
And now to be serious just for a moment. Of course he shouldn’t resign or be thrown out. Cocaine and hookers is a lot less damaging to all of us that what the usual politician gets up to……
I wonder, did he ask for a three line whip?
“Sewel, who claimed £403,799 in expenses between 2001 and 2010, was caught on camera snorting three lines of cocaine in three quarters of an hour.
He pays just £1,000 a month in “protected rent” on his “grace and favour” Pimlico property.
An identical studio flat in Dolphin Square costs £2,817 to rent — affording him a £1,817 discount.”
But if you live in a Council Flat and earn half what this twit *earns* you will now have to pay the market rate.
This is really the problem with this country in a nutshell. He’s in trouble for doing one thing that isn’t illegal (whoring) and two things that shouldn’t be (drugs and possibly insulting an ethnic minority).
Honestly, again and again I find myself despairing at the state of things in our Puritan society.
Let he who has never had a hookers and coke night cast the first stone.
I had a hookers and rum-&-coke night once. Well more than once actually, but I’ve never done marching powder.
By the way, I think the “a night” that Tim is querying is just journalist waffle. He apparently paid them £200 each, time period unspecified.
Is George Osborne going to tell us how he feels about all of this?
I’d rather have someone who’s a bit normal and lets off steam like that (as long as they aren’t preaching against it) in charge that some weirdo like Milliband who spends his evenings locked in his bedroom masturbating over Karl Marx.
So anyway, why doesn’t publishing this count as illegal “revenge porn”?
I’m just impressed that they were of legal age.
Tim: By which you mean pederasty, right?
Ian B: Good question. An interesting novel by an interesting political activist with a rather prophetic view of the future predicts that at some point in the future, a scandal is going to happen for a high-up enough judge or political figure that will result in the invention of ‘courtesan-client privilege’- possibly with legal protection for the client as well as the whore against the revelation of what they engaged in.
Interesting how some people find it easy to excuse this kind of taxpayer-funded shenanigans but if it was a working class single mum spending her benefits on a flat screen TV, well that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Speaking personally, I’m on record a lot here criticising the whole slagging off benefits mums thing. As to the ignoble Lord, I see no difference between spending his taxpayer wages on sex and drugs, or something “respectable”. I don’t want these people getting paid at all, but while they are, what they spend it on is irrelevant.
And I wish people would stop with this “flat screen TV” cliche. There aren’t any other types available these days. It’s like complaining that somebody has electric light or a petrol driven motor car.
@Ian B
I used the flat screen TV cliche as I’d actually seen that example used by members [not you] on this very page on more than one occasion. I agree it’s outdated now, much like many of the views of the aforementioned.
He paid with a cheque? A CHEQUE?
In 2015?
Well they were going to remove cheques but they weren’t sure that the older generation could cope, I guess this is what they had in mind!
When people moan about some workshy benefits claimant buying a flat screen TV it’s not a judgement on the taste or morals of the aforementioned claimant but an opinion about the amount of money they should receive.
That is different to moralising over some politicians vices. Personally I’d like our representatives to be paid fuck all and do it from a sense of civic duty but lefties don’t like that because then only the already wealthy can stand.
Ian B is being needlessly respectful of KJ’s strawman.
Where has anyone both classed this behaviour as ‘taxpayer funded’, and then ‘excused’ it?
Or is KJ merely projecting his own view that the taxpayer foot this particular bill, and then being critical of those of us who don’t have an issue with how he spent his cash.
Some may argue that a lifetime on benefits shouldn’t give one the funds for a nice telly, or that a lifetime in Ermine should not give one funds for hookers and gak. Taking those positions, as a matter of policy, doesn’t necessarily mean taking a position on what a person *actually* does with their money.
“But if you live in a Council Flat and earn half what this twit *earns* you will now have to pay the market rate.”
Council flats charge market rent? Since when?
And in other news I see Ritchie’s narcissism allowed the ‘troll holiday’ to last only two days.
Back to work gents.
I wondered why they gave me funny looks the last time I took a cheque into the bank. Now I know.
“Cocaine and hookers is a lot less damaging to all of us that what the usual politician gets up to”
So what. Just cos we can’t get them on those things (whatever they might be), doesn’t mean he shouldn’t go for something as blatant as this. And being stupid enough to be caught.
Using your line of argument you’d never prosecute anyone for anything short of genocide :-). And possibly not that either…
The flat screen tellies thing is indeed “outdated” – it comes from the time when flat screen tellies were fucking expensive and plenty of actual working people couldn’t afford one.
Benefits should be at a level enough to sustain life – a civilised society lets no one starve.
They should not be at a level where it pays to be unemployed with the money coming from people doing a forty hour week driving cabs, or hodding bricks, or being shot at in Afghanistan, and who can’t afford the same goodies (which certainly is the case at times).
Chris,
I can’t help but wonder if this was the start of his problems. Lord Sewel is hardly a household face. So, how did The Sun know to set him up?
My guess, he did something daft like have his title on his cheques and some hooker spotted it and figured they could make some money going to the papers.
Paul Rain,
it’s why if you’re rich, you should always pay good money and always go with a professional, rather than the sort of part-timer that Rooney did. A well-paid professional won’t participate in kiss-and-tells because they risk losing their clients.
@ Snag
“Council flats charge market rent? Since when?”
Since the latest budget:
http://www.localgov.co.uk/Budget-2015-Osborne-clamps-down-on-high-earners-in-social-housing/39004
DJ,
> I’d rather have someone who’s a bit normal and lets off steam like that (as long as they aren’t preaching against it)
He was preaching against it, or as good as. I’m sure he wasn’t forced to be in charge of enforcing the same standards he’s broken.
Same as Clinton. It wasn’t just that he had an affair with an intern. It was that he did it while, amidst much triumphal fanfare, making the same thing illegal for everyone else in America.
> Personally I’d like our representatives to be paid fuck all and do it from a sense of civic duty but lefties don’t like that because then only the already wealthy can stand.
Regarding the Commons, the lefties have a point there. The Lords, though, yes: why the fuck are we paying them?
Ian,
> He’s in trouble for doing one thing that isn’t illegal (whoring) and two things that shouldn’t be (drugs and possibly insulting an ethnic minority).
Third paragraph in The Telegraph’s piece mentions that he’s on a NATO committee and therefore a blackmail risk. The Sun’s made “AND HE’S THE ONE IN CHARGE OF STANDARDS” a strapline and highlighted in red on the front page. Scanning the front pages at the airport this morning, that was my impression: the story isn’t whoring per se; it’s whoring by the man in charge of getting his colleagues sacked if they’re caught whoring. This is the usual “One rule for me and another for everyone else”, and objecting to that isn’t puritanism.
And what on Earth is your point about things that shouldn’t be illegal? I agree that drugs shouldn’t be illegal, but they are. Ordinary people get banged up for this, so how would one of our lords and masters not getting into trouble for it make the situation better? That would be good, would it, if the law were only enforced on plebs? Because puritanism?
> Lord Sewel is hardly a household face. So, how did The Sun know to set him up?
What makes you think this is the only sting they have running?
@ The Thought Gang
Hardly a ‘strawman’ argument [seems to me that’s your speciality judging by your inane comment]. Almost to a man, members of this group on the one hand have defended a rich man [by most people’s standards] spending taxpayers money [whether the actual money he spent was public money is neither here nor there and you know it] on drugs and prostitutes as none of our business. Yet on the other hand, those who live on benefits are not entitled to the ‘luxury’ of a nice telly [I take it you’ve never heard of second hand shops or freecycle?]. If you don’t already see the hypocrisy in that, then there’s not much I can do other than to suggest you might want to give some ‘thought’ to changing your nom de plume.
Anyways, not to worry. It seems his Lordship has moved on already.. 😀
http://newsthump.com/2015/07/27/lord-sewel-to-take-up-new-role-as-legend-on-campus/
KJ- that’s for high earners. It’s designed to stop subsidy of the likes of Bob Crow who don’t move on when their circumstances allow, and who tie up social housing that could be used for the poor.
Some RSL’s now let at affordable rents- 80 % of market rates, but that’s a small proportion of their stock. Often only 20% of properties that are relet, so around 100 a year for a 5000 unit landlord. To do that at all’s a policy decision, though, and not a central government diktat.
@ JS esq
Yes, that’s why I said “But if you live in a Council Flat and earn half what this twit *earns* you will now have to pay the market rate.”
Given that Lord Sewel’s salary is £84K that’s about right.
@KJ
The difference between this dickhead and the stereotypical single mum is that the dickhead is being paid (effectively) to do a job, whereas the single mum is being given money which with to feed her kids, and not (in most people’s eyes) to spend on luxuries.
Yes, there are second hand shops – there were no flat screen tellies in them when they first came out, and no foreign holidays, houses in Islington or elaborate tattooes ever.
Not that I would personally stop people buying tellies or getting tattooed (I would ask them to move out of prime London housing that working people have a two hour commute past each day).
But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people who earn a lot less than I do to moan about those who don’t work buying stuff they themselves cannot afford.
@JS
“Yes, that’s why I said “But if you live in a Council Flat and earn half what this twit *earns* you will now have to pay the market rate.”
Given that Lord Sewel’s salary is £84K that’s about right.”
I sincerely hope that if Corbyn is elected he makes this part of his first manifesto. Ordinary folks will love it!
> Almost to a man, members of this group on the one hand have defended a rich man [by most people’s standards] spending taxpayers money [whether the actual money he spent was public money is neither here nor there and you know it] on drugs and prostitutes as none of our business.
I don’t say that. I think he’s a leech on the public purse and a Grade-A hypocrite.
@ Interested
If these workers are so peed off with their lot in comparison to those on benefits, why don’t they join them? Or better still, swap roles? After all, surveys show the former are generally far happier with their lot than the latter.
Of course, the fact there’s not enough work to go round is a factor that is often overlooked in these debates. Also, the ‘shirker’ no longer threatens our existence [since we’re no longer a hunter-gatherer species]. If anything, he’s a help, as his not looking for work increases the chances of others who are looking getting some..
Some of Lord Sewel’s prossies most likely were single mothers.
Just read a piece on Sewel in The Guardian. As usual they somehow forgot to note that he’s Labour. But early on they note that he faced criticism from an MP, and they didn’t forget to note that he’s Labour.
KJ,
Isn’t a more accurate analogy for this chap – and what they do with their money – a public sector employee (ie earning at the public teat), rather than someone on benefits (not earning).
Apols, Interested beat me to it..
KJ.
Sex workers is the more accurate description these days.
An up to date trope would be curved 4K telly’s I would imagine. And Virgin rather than $ky HD.
The vagaries of technological push v social pull for the copy writers.
KJ at 10.29
Low level clickbait
KJ – I certainly don’t want to be gratuitously horrible to workshy scroungers, but if you’re an able-bodied adult who chooses to live his entire life at the expense of taxpayers, then it’s only fair that non-lazy people should get to make you their slave.
the fact there’s not enough work to go round
There’s an infinite amount of work to go round. They could be washing my car, for example.
Or forced to compete in gladiatorial combat for my amusement, while the comelier she-chavs massage my temples and hand-feed me peeled grapes.
I am not a monster. I would reward good service with scratchcards, fags, and bottles of WKD.
That would be what economists call a “win-win”.
I have an acquaintance whose job occasionally requires a visit to one of the Houses.
On one visit to the Lords he was stopped and told to do up his top shirt button, so as to “maintain the standards of the House”.
It’s no good, Try as I might, I can’t resist any longer,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWFFzDtzSwU
@ Steve
I await your rant against posh kids getting large inheritances because of the sperm lottery with huge anticipation 🙂
Of course, what would really sort this all out is a basic income.
KJ – I await your rant against posh kids getting large inheritances because of the sperm lottery
I feel sorry for posh kids. Nobody should have to go through life saddled with a name like “Rafe”.
My kids won the real sperm lottery. I don’t mean to boast, but that stuff’s like magic bullets. I know people who have to work at making a baby, but I get the job done like an elite sniper.
Two minutes in heaven, and… Boom! You’re pregnant!
Then I like to have a little sleep. It’s tiring work being a stud.
Steve Crook,
“So what. Just cos we can’t get them on those things (whatever they might be), doesn’t mean he shouldn’t go for something as blatant as this.”
Something as blatant as what? Some bloke doing something legal and something illegal that hundreds of thousands of people do that everyone turns a blind eye to when their mates do it?
Whatever you think of politicians, someone has to empty the bins and pay the troops. And I’d much rather have someone who got 99% of them emptied and spent his friday nights with a couple of hookers than some regular guy who doesn’t cheat on his wife and only does 80% of the bins. But we much more quickly fire people for their off-duty activities than their on-duty ones.
The private sector doesn’t go in for this BS. One of the few cases I saw of someone getting fired (as opposed to paid off) was a Christian woman who just couldn’t do her job.
@KJ
‘If these workers are so peed off with their lot in comparison to those on benefits, why don’t they join them? Or better still, swap roles? After all, surveys show the former are generally far happier with their lot than the latter.’
Eh? The only way you get to criticise someone for doing stuff (stuff your cash helps to enable, at that) is if you do what they do?
You are a true intellectual powerhouse.
Interested,
> The only way you get to criticise someone for doing stuff … is if you do what they do?
No, I think KJ’ss point was that, if being on benefits is so great, we should see people voting with their feet and giving up work to go onto benefits. I assume he missed the spate of stories of exactly that happening under Labour — and not just from borderline craply paid work, either: there were some proper professionals making real money, who were doing the sums, realising they were effectively working for less than nothing, and going on the dole. (Don’t know whether the incentives are still that skewed and whether it’s still happening.)
> Some bloke doing something legal and something illegal that hundreds of thousands of people do that everyone turns a blind eye to when their mates do it?
The police don’t turn a blind eye to it. It’s an activity that comes with a risk of getting caught and facing prosecution. In my experience, people who do it accept that risk and act accordingly. Anyone with half a brain would realise that being in the Lords makes you a bit more of a target than being a call centre worker from Solihull and would therefore, perhaps, not do it in front of people they couldn’t trust. If nothing else, Sewel’s too fucking stupid to keep his job. And I don’t think people who can’t reliably assess a very basic risk should be even tangentially influential on the military.
@S2
‘No, I think KJ’ss point was that, if being on benefits is so great, we should see people voting with their feet and giving up work to go onto benefits.’
I don’t think it’s that binary. It’s quite possible to be a working person who grumbles at the fact that x% of his/her wages goes to provide goodies that he/she can’t afford, or even to provide goodies that he/she can afford but feels should not be provided via benefits, without deciding to jack it all in and go on the dole.
For starters, work is often your social life; if poorer people could jack it all in simultaneously with their workmates and all hang around together on the piss, I’m guessing many would.
Point is, single motherhood is a choice – as is single fatherhood and (for many people) being on the dole.
We must stop pretending that there are no jobs, and that the majority of the unemployed are hopeless cases who just cannot find anything to do and must be supported.
Sure, there are people like this (and distinguishing the real from the unreal is very hard except for their neighbours), but we are a species that came out of Africa, trekked thousands of miles, defeated famine, disease, wild animals, cold and all manner of other shit, and then invented all the stuff we now have.
I have no problem with anyone getting food and shelter (or with genuinely disabled people getting as good a life as we can give them), but able bodied people who belong to the species that did all of the above should not be allowed to sit on their arses all day doing fuck all AND get paid to do it.
They can do it for free, or they can earn the money to do it at weekends by washing cars, running errands, working in McDonalds, whatever (like many other people do).
He received £403,799 in expenses, spent half of it on hookers and coke and the rest of it he just wasted.
Frankly, the most shocking thing about the entire story is that he found a tart who accepts cheques, he must have met her plenty of times before.
magnusw
Reminds of me that quote from George Best: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”
I’m totally in favour of the idea that I get unemployed people to run errands and do odd jobs for me, being a “hardworking taxpayer” or whatever the current condescending phrase-du-jour is.
From Guido this AM:
Another BBC smear on the Marr show yesterday:
“Lord Coke, Tory peer’s drug binges with £200 prostitutes”
That would be Lord Sewel, independent peer since 2012, before which he was Labour
Same as Clinton. It wasn’t just that he had an affair with an intern. It was that he did it while, amidst much triumphal fanfare, making the same thing illegal for everyone else in America.
And Eliot Spitzer. Utter cunt.
I’ve paid about 45k in tax this year, can I have a single mum as a skiv please? Just to to my washing and ironing really, and stop the house turning into a complete tip. A good looking one preferably, but anythings better than doing my own laundry.
Jim… move to Hong Kong or Singapore, pay a small fraction of the tax and employ a sexy little Filipino to Indonesian to do your house work. It’s no wonder they’re the wealthiest places on earth.
Live the dream.
I’m impressed at the knowledge of the prostitution industry displayed by the TW panel and I like it.
@BiG
What the living fuck is wrong with people doing odd jobs to make a living? Why is it condescending to suggest it? I’ve done it myself, and I’ve run my fair share of errands too. Beats sitting on your arse.
But look if you want to pay people to do fuck all for long periods, fine. I don’t. It takes all sorts I guess.
“Proper professionals making real money” decided to go on the dole and get ~£70 a week?
Sorry, but I find that hard to believe.
@ Dongguan Jaun
“Personally I’d like our representatives to be paid fuck all and do it from a sense of civic duty but lefties don’t like that because then only the already wealthy can stand.”
I totally agree with part 1 of that statement but not with part 2 – Trade Union sponsorship of MPs was invented to overcome that problem. Local Government Councillors were unpaid until Nicholas Ridley ignored the views of Conservative Councillors to introduce pay and meetings were mostly held in the evenings after work so that workers could attend (a few firms, ICI being a shining example, gave time off with pay for employees to attend Council meetings, regardless of their political affiliation because they regarded good management of the borough to be in their own best interests), but there was a disproportionate number of retired people, housewives, and trade union officials, with a smattering of self-employed people (e.g. our Dentist) and employees who put up with it costing them money. I reckon the old system produced far better councillors than the new, just as the British unpaid Blood Donor System works much better than the US paid system which collects much polluted blood.
@ DJ
At whom do you wish me to cast the stone?
@ ukliberty
I do recall (because it’s the sort of thing that sticks in one’s memory) that an acquaintance told me just how “laid back” was a female partner in the firm stockbrokers for whom he worked that she claimed benefits when the firm made a loss so her income was negative. Female partners were so few in those days I could probably have identified her if I tried but I chose not to do so as he chose not to give her name.
That was a long time ago under old Labour, but under Gordon Brown’s rules I calculated that a married person, with a part-time working spouse in my current home town would need at least £25k from a job in London to be as well off as living on the dole after paying train fares, which are ignored in the tax and benefit system. I used to work with a guy who commuted in from a bit beyond Norwich, so depending on one’s definition of “real money” I don’t think it is hard to believe.
There are some guys who choose to work despite being better off on the dole (memorably our window-cleaner when I was a kid – and I shouldn’t fancy that job even if I was paid). Recently I have periodically “subbed” my younger son (whose ethical standards exceeds his economic sense) for train fares pending his getting paid for note-taking for disabled students: frequently his travelling time exceeded paid time and sometimes train fares exceeded the day’s pay, even excluding the cost of lunch/water.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2299927/Sharon-Minkin-refuses-job-better-benefits.html
S2,
“But 18 years ago, after her second child was born she gave it all up to be a stay-at-home mother.”
Not quite what you appeared to have claimed in your earlier post, and not only because the story is from 2013, when the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed the government, not Labour.
I’m not entirely certain of the veracity of that story or how representative it is. I don’t for example see how she could have been a recipient of ESA on the facts alleged. Or why she and her three children required “free dental care, free eye care and free school trips, which would cost extra £200 a month”. How much work were they having done and were they traveling first class?!
Googling it, it looks like part of an attempt to get her publicity and media payments.