The Tories are trying to manipulate desperate people in a bid to cling to power – it’s shameless and stupid

I’ve never thought of the Labour MP John Mann has some sort of gigolo character, the Belle de Jour of Bassetlaw. Independent minded, yes; doughty campaigner against antisemitism, for sure; possessed of an unusually fertile mind, undoubtedly.

Yet there he was, on the telly, fluttering his eyebrows at his potential punters in HM Treasury: “Show me the money.” Maybe when he gets it he’ll stick it under his suspender belt.

The political cruising going on in Westminster is blatant. Theresa May, true to Tory form, will do anything to stay in power. In this case it means dishing out huge sums of taxpayers’ money to “coalfield communities”, which have endured economic hardship in recent years. In south Yorkshire, the east Midlands and elsewhere there is a rich seam of Labour MPs to be mined. All that is needed is for the government to start sending some money their way.

It is disgraceful, and worse, very, very stupid. Leaving aside the painful irony that the Tories closed the coal mines down in the first place, about 30 years ago, and that it is long past time since any financial assistance could help rebuild broken towns and pit villages, there is no guarantee that the Tories won’t just claw the cash back one day.

If you want a guarantee, as Clint Eastwood once said, buy a toaster; you’re not going to get a guarantee, or at least a reliable one, from the charlatans now running the country. What the Treasury giveth, the Treasury can taketh away. Ask the miners. Maybe they’ll throw in an apology about Orgreave. After all, it’s cost free, and Thatcher’s dead.

Second, why should Worksop, for example, be in receipt of such monies, but Dundee (facing the imminent closure of the Michelin tyre factory) will not? Is it because Dundee is less deserving than Worksop?

Or is to because the two SNP members for Dundee – Stewart Hosie and Chris Law – are about the last people the Tory chief whip would approach with a wheelbarrow full of cash.

If the Labour MPs think that they are helping their Leave-inclined voters, they are also wrong. A new leisure centre of a hospital wing wasn’t going to outweigh the long-term impact of a post-Brexit hard recession in their seats. The chances are that they will also get deselected by local Labour activists, usually bitterly opposed to Brexit. They’ll be out of a job themselves soon.

As a footnote, too, why is it that the frontbench shadow ministers can abstain on motions with a three-line whip and escape getting the sack? When they helped sink the Cooper-Boles amendment, they effectively saved the May government from humiliation, delayed the chances of an election and a Labour government, and botched one of the best chances to rule out a no-deal Brexit. They have betrayed their party. They’ve been told off by the chief whip.

Last, we should ask ourselves what sort of a country we are becoming. Transactional politics isn’t that new, of course, but the scale of it is. Only last year we witnessed the DUP extract a bung of public money – £1bn – for Northern Ireland in return for their “Confidence and Supply” agreement that props up the May government.

Things are turning obscene if public auctions of parliamentary votes are apparently taking place on Sky News. It doesn’t do much for the image of parliament and politics. Perhaps it should be a matter for Speaker Bercow, or the Commons privileges committee. It is certainly something of an insult to the rest of us who happen to live in places where the Labour member of parliament isn’t on the game.