All parties across the political spectrum can produce some pretty seedy characters. Who can forget after all the way that Tory PM John Major’s govt took a hit when his ‘back to basics’ campaign after various sex scandals emerged or how Labour’s Tom Driberg had Communist sympathies and hung round with the Kray Twins. However, it seems that the Liberal Democrat party is probably the one with the most gropers, coprophiles, closet gays, alleged child abusers and adulterers than any other. It’s a small party but it seems contain within it an awful lot of people whose attitudes to sex and their sexual activity is to say the least ‘questionable’.

Now another Lib Dem is in trouble for dodgy sexual peccadillos. According to the Guido Fawkes site, the Lib Dem peer, Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC, has been suspended by the House of Lords for a record three and a half years. It is stated in the Guido piece that Lord Lester has been suspended for ‘sexual harassment and “corrupt inducement” to sexual relations’. The piece on Guido’s site also mentioned that Lord Lester was accused of soliciting sex from a campaigner in exchange for passing legislation.

Guido said about this aspect of the case:

Lester was forced to resign as a Lib Dem spokesman after allegations that he had demanded sex from a female campaigner in return for help to pass legislation. The investigation upheld the complaint “on the basis of the strong and cogent evidence of the complainant and her witnesses.”

I’m realistic and cynical enough to know that in hothouse environments such as the Palace of Westminster, affairs and sometimes less than savoury sexual relationships are likely to occur. But, to do what Lord Lester of Herne Hill has done and offer to swap sex for legislative support, is in another league altogether to the sort of illicit affairs and closet homosexuality that has for years been a feature of the Palace.

Lord Lester, along with the other sexually dodgy characters that have been harboured by the Lib Dem party is increasingly showing that this party has gone beyond merely being ‘liberal’ and are now thoroughly libertine.