The politician’s guide on how to handle a scandal

As the row over Robert Jenrick’s role in the approval of a property scheme continues, Sean O'Grady considers what could happen next

Is the housing secretary important enough to survive? (Reuters)

As the celebrated 19th-century politician and historian Thomas B Macaulay famously put it: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.”

The populace, in other words, ironically hypocritical, asks rather more of its rulers than it does of itself.

So it does, but that provides little more than wry comfort to the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government. Robert Jenrick has already had one run-in with public opinion in recent months, when he was accused of breaking lockdown and now his role in approving a lucrative property deal involving the billionaire Richard Desmond, a Tory party donor, has come in for some attention. A judge has already quashed the minister’s approval of the property development, and he has accepted he acted unlawfully.