bob spink: this charming man

As Bob Spink jumps ship from the Conservatives to UKIP, it's helpful to remember that he didn't have any future as a Tory anyway.

You may remember him as the man who stood up in Parliament to declare he had resigned the whip.. to be informed that he couldn't actually do that, as the whip had already been withdrawn.

Mr Spink raised a point of order during a debate on the Budget, saying he had "resigned the Conservative Party whip because the Conservative Party has failed to deal with serious criminal and other irregularities in my constituency".

But the party says it withdrew the whip - excluding him from the Tory group at Westminster - when he emailed the chief whip threatening to resign, accusing the party of "not doing enough to protect him during efforts by his association to deselect him".

An investigation, incidentally, had produced no evidence of criminal irregularities. The fall-out between Spink and his local party was allegedly far more personal: he'd been having an affair with a former Conservative councillor, Gail Boland – the long-term partner of the local association’s deputy chairman, Bill Sharp.

Personal animosity aside, it's also possibly not the image of moral values that would appeal to socially conservative Conservatives who had previously supported Spink as a homo-hating, hang 'em and flog 'em candidate.

In a letter the Conservative Chief Whip, Patrick McLoughlin, replied: "As a matter of good party discipline I cannot have MPs making threats to resign the whip at a time of their own choosing, if the demands of the party are not met.

"I must therefore treat your resignation as taking immediate effect".

When Spink became whipless in March, he was facing a third attempt to deselect him. As The Times helpfully pointed out:

As he no longer holds the Tory whip, that meeting becomes irrelevant: a sitting MP not in receipt of the whip could not be selected as a candidate for the next election.

In other words, he jumped to UKIP before he could be pushed. Again. He wasn't ever going to stand as a Tory candidate again.

On a related note, during the last round of expenses sleaze, The Telegraph helpfully reported that:

Mr Spink pays his former wife, Janet, £28,000 a year to work as his constituency secretary even though she lives more than 100 miles away in Dorset. [...] On Sunday, it also emerged that the Tory MP has employed Ashleigh Sharp as a parliamentary assistant since 2006. Ms Sharp, who was a 17-year-old A-level student when first employed, is the daughter of Mr Spink's former partner Gail Boland.

Ms Boland, a Conservative councillor, was Mr Spink's lover when her daughter was first employed by the MP. She is paid more than £5,000 a year despite now studying at Buckingham University.

Finally, you may also recall that he was one of the co-authors of Nadine Dorries' minority report on abortion - which, presumably having not read the report, he described as "more scientifically sound." Science says, "no."