The only relevant matter in all of this is the fraudulent expenses claim. David Laws sexuality has only a prurient interest to the public, but no doubt their are tabloids out there that are all too ready to feed that interest.
Many of those apologists of David Laws who are now seeking to minimise what he did by suggesting that his Double First should in some way act as a protective moat around his past, present, and future conduct; were the same apologists, as I remember, that had very little charity within them for the fraudsters of the last parliament. Many waxed purple (usually with rage) about the need to clean up parliament; to sweep away the decaying standards of behaviour, and bring a new broom of reform to bare.
David Laws had been in office for little more than two weeks, yet he was fast attaining the status of elder statesmen. The Lord only knows to what heights he would have reached after a month; such was the adoration for this much regarded intellect. He was to be the scythe that was to rid us of our deficit. He had a blue print for recovery worked out. It appears that, rather than being a Liberal Democrat, David Laws was, at heart, a Tory. Which is why so many of them in the press and on the web have sought to whitewash his financial shenanigans, while reprimanding similar behaviour within the last parliament.
Why should a millionaire care about the petty cash of expenses when he was getting a salary as an MP? Why should he try to work the system? He has said he came into politics, to serve the public - a duty if you like. For which he was quite rightly given a salary. So why did this man raid the petty cash?
The more I learn of David Laws behaviour, the more I come to believe that his homosexuality played and important part. His anxiety of being outed seems to have been his primary fear. To this extent, and only to this extent, does his sexuality have a part to play.
I believe David Laws was a liberal out of fear rather than conviction. I believe intellectually he was, and had always been a Tory. But he felt at home in the liberal tent where, even if he were 'found out', the party would rally round. If only David Laws could have appreciated how the nature of his sexuality would have advanced him in his career within whatever party he settled for in modern Britain.
But traditionally, the Tory party, through its rank and file of so called 'old reactionaries', would have halted his political progress. It was not conservatism that drove David Laws into the arms of liberalism, but his sexuality. But above everything else, even in this day and age, David Law, it seems, feared discovery more than death, and this is sad because it implies his family may have been unaware of his sexuality. A family (without sounding to much like a agony aunt) he cares very much for. David Laws had to go. He had to pay in the same way that less, shall we say, comfortably well off members had to pay in the last parliament
David Laws has to pay the price, not for his sexuality, but because he raided the public purse illegally after demanding from the rest of us a program of austerity. A programme which, however strict, David Laws will, because of his manipulative behaviour and personal wealth, be free from financial hardship - and this should be the end of the matter.
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