I never liked Keith Vaz, but now I pity him – he's not a hypocrite and he doesn't deserve to be sacked

“Let’s get this party started!”

Like many a knees-up, the libertine evening spent by Keith Vaz in the company, allegedly, of a couple of economic migrants from Eastern Europe ended with one hell of a hangover. Now that he is expected to stand down as chair of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee or face a vote of no confidence, he really is friendless. So allow me, no friend of his usually, to offer a word of support, and regret about what happened to him.

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy” wasn’t the usual reaction to l’affaire Vaz, and it is true he is a pretty unlovable figure (except when there’s a fee involved), but, as I say, on this one I think he was badly treated. Let us examine some of the aspects of this odd business, shall we?

First off, he is, or was, chair of a “powerful Commons select committee”. That’s easy to dispose of. The only select committees that are worth bothering with are the venerable Public Accounts Committee and the Treasury Committee. All the rest are basically sinecures for the retired, the frustrated and the bored of the parliamentary world. I know there are some live wires around, such as Frank Field, but basically that’s what select committees amount to. They grandstand, they call witnesses where a dozen of them each get a turn to ask questions, and thus get nowhere in their polite gang bangs (if you’ll pardon the expression).

Ministers don’t take their reports that seriously and they can’t actually decide to do anything. They just express a view which the Home Secretary can take or, more usually, leave. So, far from being a massive power in the land, Vaz was just a publicity seeking spectator at the political feast. What he does, or doesn’t do, in his private life doesn’t matter much in the big scheme of things.

Then there is one of the most severe charges in the journalistic rule book, only just below “paedo” and “serial killer” in Fleet Street’s legal code of shame: hypocrisy. Here, Vaz doesn’t really register. His committee, roughly speaking, has said the Government ought to go easy on sex workers (of all kinds) and on drugs. Their reports, hitherto unnoticed (see paragraph above), are therefore perfectly consistent with Keith’s easy-going attitude toward poppers and “kinky” sex. It would be hypocritical if Vaz was some kind of puritanical evangelical preacher going on about abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh and calling for stricter sentencing for small scale drug possession. He wasn’t, so even the most severe media critic of him – a crowded field, that – ought to dismiss the charge of hypocrisy, or at least pass a lenient sentence, such as three days’ acute embarrassment and lasting damage and misery to members of his family who have certainly done nothing wrong.

The Sunday Mirror might reply: “Okay, he wasn’t a hypocrite, but he was using his position of ‘power’ (see paragraph above, again) to change the law to make his ‘secret life’ more legal than it is.” Except that he can’t change the law and his secret life was, mostly, perfectly legal anyway.

Put it this way: if one of your mates decided to pay someone to get a bit of coke, do you think they should lose their job over it? Unlike singers, footballers and (even less convincingly) gay bishops, it is difficult for the tabloids to claim that Keith Vaz is some sort of role model for the nation’s youth. This superannuated workday political hack isn’t a role model for anyone. Indeed, Vaz’s alter ego, “Jim the industrial washing machine man” (“Not little ones for caravans. They’re the size of this wall”) sounds a bit more interesting than Keith the MP for Leicester East who once had to resign as a Home Office minister because of something we can’t quite remember, and who is mainly famous for his outsize ego (not the kind that would fit into a caravan, but the size of a wall).

The right thing for Vaz’s parliamentary colleagues to have done would have been to punish him quietly through the medium of the playground/office tease. Thus, as they gather for their sessions, the other people on the Select Committee could say, “Hey Keith, my washing machine won’t go on full spin – any ideas?” Or, “Do you think Brexit should mean the end of free movement from Romania?” Or, “Sorry, Keith I can’t make the whole session today as I have to pop out.” I’m sure they could think of wittier ones than that. They didn’t have to push him out.

Keith Vaz is a vain man who has never distinguished himself in public life, despite the slightly pompous demeanour and grand-sounding title (see earlier paragraph above, for the final time). He was a hopeless rent-a-quote, though many a breakfast TV producer must have been grateful for his ability to turn up at odd hours to deliver the required soundbite. I imagine he could be helpful to Mirror Group reporters looking for a “line” (an angle, that is, rather than the cocaine kind), too.

He was game for most stunts. I well recall him turning up at Heathrow to “welcome” the expected tidal wave of Romanian migrants when restrictions were lifted on New Year’s Day 2014 (oh, the irony of it). I once heard him use the word “personed” meaning “manned” when discussing some foul-up in the Border Agency, a ridiculous word from a ridiculous man. Less amusingly, I cannot get out of my head his support for Greville Janner, a fellow Leicester Labour MP, in the Commons chamber in 1991 when he declared: “May I join the honourable member for Rutland and Melton [Mr Latham] in condemning the cowardly attacks made on the character of my honourable and learned friend the member for Leicester West [Mr Janner]. I am sure that we all want to pass on our good wishes to his wife and family after their terrible ordeal over the past few months.” I’m not trying to smear Vaz here, but I do think, certainly with what we know now, that was an obvious misjudgement, and a far worse one than those he is currently accused of.

So that’s the end of Vaz. He always was an absurd figure, and has now become a pitiful figure of fun, and you’d be right in saying I can’t resist a few digs either. Touch of hypocrisy there, admittedly.

And yet, flawed as he is, I do indeed pity him. Here is a human being who hasn’t actually done anyone any harm, has broken the law – perhaps – only a bit (if what the tabloids report is correct), and liked nothing more than a bit of private fun. Who doesn’t? His life, and his family’s life, have been destroyed by the press. There are worse things to be caught doing, there really are, than a few poppers and rent boys, and the personal punishment, as I say, meted out to his blameless family, is hardly just. He won’t be the last, of course. Fleet Street’s party never ends.