Lord Sewel Is Doing Cocaine with Your Dad's Taxes

Lord Sewel is a baller. Lord Sewel is a fucking baller. Lord Sewel is as old if not older than your granddad, and he just snorted cocaine off someone's boob while slagging off George Bush. While wearing a bra. I think if we sat him down and asked him, Snoop Dogg would admit that it has been a while since that happened in his life. I think if we sat him down and asked him, Snoop Dogg wouldn't be able to muster a more shady opinion than saying George Bush – for all his crimes, for all his sins – was, as Lord Sewel said, a "bad artist". When was the last time you busted someone who once started a war down to their DNA for being bad at painting? Was it never? And so we find ourselves in the curious position where an ex-Labour peer is literally more badass than you, me, and Snoop Dogg rolled into one. What a world.

And so to recap: the Sun on Sunday got hold of a video of Lord Sewel saying Tony Blair was bad imo and George Bush was a bad artist imo and that David Cameron was some sort of puff of air in the shape of a human, a sort of faceless and substanceless paste, more press release than man imo, and then the police raided his house and long story short: today he resigned from being a Lord.

"Oh," you say, "Lord Sewel isn't a baller—" HIS MIDDLE NAME IS BUTTIFANT

I mean yes, morally it is bad that he cheated on his wife to do the aforementioned cocaine-fuelled sex party. He said some awful, reprehensible stuff that fetishised Asian women. And some people – the kind of people who care about the concept of "taxpayers' money" – yer da, basically – some people might get their noses put out by the fact that Sewel spent what was the equivalent of a Lord's taxpayer-funded daily allowance on two sex workers and a bunch of cocaine. Okay, yes: I take those criticisms, they are all valid.

But when you focus on that you are ignoring the sheer iconic artistry of Lord Sewel doing some cocaine off a boob. Point one: as a peer, Sewel was literally in charge of upholding standards in the House of Lords; Point two: if you've seen the video, he speaks like a kindly old professor who just happens to like gak and sex parties when he's not thinking about Shakespeare really hard; Point three: he deliberately snorts his drugs through a £5 note because he kept doing cocaine at sex parties through a £10 note but the £10 note kept getting stolen and he didn't have enough money to buy breakfast. He has a contingency plan in place for his post gak 'n' sex party breakfast, and it is "unfurling his coke straw and asking for two McMuffins".

At the centre of the Sewel Ferrero Rocher is the roasted hazelnut truth: there is absolutely no reason to hold people up to dizzying moral standards just because they are a Lord or peer. Let he who has never wanted to do cocaine off a boob cast the first stone. Because look at Lord Sewel: I mean, he's just some div in dinnerlady glasses, isn't he? He's just some old fucker having some sordid fun. And he has fallen to those curious double standards promoted by tabloid newspapers – they like posed naked breasts, but shun actual sex; they employ the nod-nod wink-wink man-of-the-people schtick, but get outraged when someone takes the nation's second favourite drug; they deify the rich, but want to see them fall; they pay sex workers for their stories, but moralise about the work itself, which they paint as tacky and impure.

I'm not saying Sewel's completely clear of all wrongdoing, here. He pays £1,000-a-month in a rent-protected Westminster flat that he has threesomes in. Anyone who pays tax, however distantly, does technically pay for that and within this story there are definite shades of hypocrisy, indignity and carnal weakness.

But come on: it's just a bit of gak and sex, isn't it?

1 in 10 of us have taken gak.

9.5 out of 10 of us probably like sex, and 1 in 10 British men have paid for it. When it comes to our own lives, we don't seem particularly averse to cheating.

If you think about it, Lord Sewel is saying to the man in the street: I get you. I like orgasms and head rushes, too. He's reaching behind his back and unclasping the orange bra he is wearing and saying: I am you and you are me. He is reaching through the complex series and tunnels and pipes that is the British class system and giving you a firm handshake that says: I, too, like a dab of sherbet and a bit of in-out. He's the man on the street and the lord in the castle. He is the whipper and the whipped. He is everything we're not and everything we want to be. He is suddenly unemployed. He is very baller indeed.

@joelgolby

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