The Guido Fawkes blog has been handed proof of a significant Tory party scandal, but they've handled it in an atrocious way.
Rumours had been circulating for days that the Tory party had compiled a secret dossier of sex pest Tory MPs. Tory HQ denied its existence, but someone has leaked the spreadsheet to the Guido.
Instead of posting the unedited dossier of 36 sex pest MPs (over 10% of serving Tory MPs are on the spreadsheet), Guido has posted a heavily redacted version with all of the names blacked out, and a significant proportion of the alleged offences too.
If obscuring the names of sex pests in order to maximise profits on the story isn't gross enough, there's a sad little know-it-all boast at the end that proves how bad the problem of sleazy sexual conduct at Westminster really is, and that Guido is actually part of the problem.
The brag that "Guido had heard all but three of the stories before" goes to show that knowledge of this kind of repulsive sexual misconduct was widespread, but nobody in Westminster actually did anything to confront or expose it.
Numerous people in the Westminster bubble felt comfortable enough to go and gossip to Paul Staines and his Guido mates about the sexual misconduct of their fellow parliamentarians, but they didn't think to confront the sex pests, or to report them.
And then, despite running a website dedicated to scurrilous Tabloid style muck-raking, Paul and his mates have just openly admitted sitting on the information that more than 10% of current Tory MPs are known/heavily suspected perverts, rather than investigating the accusations further and publicly exposing them.
It's only when the spreadsheet of Tory sex pests fell into their hands that they decided to publish (a heavily redacted version of) it, and presumably only because if they had it, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before someone else got their hands on it too.
It's pretty much beyond doubt that the names on the list will eventually come out, either as Guido drip feeds them one by one to maximise clicks and ad revenues, or when someone at the Tory party decides to leak the non-redacted version of the spreadsheet to another more responsible outlet to stop the Chinese water torture of one-by-one reveals on the Guido blog.
Despite breaking the story in this grubby and self-incriminating manner, Guido are absolutely right about one thing. This spreadsheet is going to "send shockwaves through the Tory party and the government" however May handles it.
After Jeremy Corbyn moved swiftly to remove the party whip from Jared O'Mara and suspend him from the Labour Party over his history of posting bigoted Internet comments before he even became an MP, May must come under pressure to deal similarly with at least some of the worst of her sex pest MPs; However If she suspends even a third of the 36 alleged Tory sex pest MPs, her parliamentary majority evaporates and leaves her completely powerless to enact legislation without the support of MPs from either Labour or the pro-EU Lib-Dems or SNP!
On the orther hand she would have an awfully difficult job trying to explain why most of this grotesque assortment of 36 alleged perverts and sex pests in her party don't deserve the same treatment as Jared O'Mara got while the claimed offences during their time as MPs are investigated.
So she either follows Jeremy Corbyn's lead, does the decent thing, and flushes away her parliamentary majority in the process. Or she puts herself in the outrageous position of being more far more lenient on the repulsive sexual misconduct of her MPs than Jeremy Corbyn was on one of his MPs for having been an obnoxious little Internet gobshite before he even entered parliament.
It's a lose-lose situation for Theresa May, but her limpet like impulse to cling to power means she's almost certainly going to take the PR hit of refusing to punish the sexual misconduct of her own MPs in order to save her own skin.
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