After you, Cecil

My parents had a great routine when they were out together. As they approached a door, dad would leap forward and hold the door open saying 'After you, Claude!" and my mother would say as she swept past him 'No, after you, Cecil!' I think the routine came from a radio show of the 1940s. They said the names with phoney posh English accents and I've never been able to take these names seriously since.

I thought of them today when I read Cecil Parkinson's obituary.

My father also had a motto about politicians: Tories are done down by sex - it's all that boarding school education - they just can't cope with real life, while Labour get found out over money - they can't resist the temptation to put their fingers in the till. The difference between Labour politicians who have gone to jail for fiddling money and Cecil Parkinson is this: he was a dead-beat dad, was Cecil.

That's not what they called him 30 years ago when he had an affair with his secretary. He tried to make her have an abortion and then abandoned her and the child, slapped an injunction on them to stop them talking to the press or the press talking about them, and - most awful of all - he never met his daughter.

This affair wasn't a one-night roll in the hay - it lasted 12 years, during which he promised to leave his wife and marry the secretary. I think after the first 5 or 6 years, she might have twigged it's not going to happen.

Cecil was Margaret Thatcher's best - maybe only real - friend in politics. That tells you a lot about her judgement of people. Not that he was very posh. Neither was she. Unlike the jumped-up, lick-spittle wanna-be aristos now lording it over us on the Tory front bench in Westminster, Thatcher and Parkinson had fairly ordinary origins. While the Cameron/Osborne lot just ooze a sense of entitlement, Thatcher and her pal oozed naked ambition: they had something to prove. Both of them over-reached themselves, Thatcher thought only she knew what to do and isolated herself within her cabinet and Parkinson thought he could do what he liked because Thatcher would protect him.

It's arrogance, isn't it? And it's horrible to watch. Especially when a blameless child is involved.