Cracking the Whip

“The state this party has been reduced to is enough to make a grown man weep – never, in fifty years as a member, twenty of them as a constituency treasurer, expect to have an MP calling me in the early hours of the morning pleading for money,” declares Colonel Hugh Ponsonby-Smythe (Ret’d), treasured of the West Firkham constituency branch of the Conservative Party, recalling the recent events that catapulted the local party into the headlines. “Yet that’s exactly what happened last month when that blighter we selected at the last election woke me up at three in the morning screaming that some ‘rough men’ had him locked in a house and wouldn’t let him go unless he coughed up five thousand quid!” With the MP – Freddie Froderingham – pleading with him not to involve the police, Ponsonby-Smythe felt that he had no choice but to comply, finding himself driving to a four in the morning meeting with the kidnappers in the deserted car park of a local shopping centre, a brown paper envelope stuffed with cash in the glove compartment of his car. “Of course, the only way I could lay my hands on that kind of cash at that hour was by borrowing from the local party funds, which happened to be in the safe in my study,” the seventy four year old retired Guards officer explains. “When I got to the rendezvous, the only other vehicle there was a rusty Transit van – a fellow wearing a black ski mask got out and approached my car.” Ponsonby-Smythe also left his vehicle and met the masked man at the trolley return point, as previously agreed. “Well, I handed over the cash, but there was still no sign of Froderingham,” he says. “Then the masked chappie signalled to the van and the rear doors flew open and Froderingham was bundled out – naked, in chains and with a ball gag in his mouth!”

As the van sped off, Ponsonby-Smythe did his best to free the MP. Before driving him back to his house. “It seemed pretty obvious to me that he’d been at some kind of sex den, then failed to pay up, resulting in all this nonsense,” he says. “Well, I wasn’t amused, I can tell you. I told him in no uncertain terms that he now owed the local party five thousand pounds and that I expected it to be paid back pretty damned quickly. Honestly, he seemed a pretty decent sort when we selected him as our candidate, but you never can tell, can you?” While Ponsonby-Smythe felt that he had got to the bottom of the matter, press speculation as to exactly what happened to the MP has been rife since the story became public. “There have been rumours about Freddie Froderingham doing the rounds for months now,” reveals Harry Hink. Westminster Correspondent for the Daily Norks. “Apparently he’s been going around trying to get money off of colleagues, researchers, even journalists, for an age. There were also stories of rent-boys and wild sex and drug parties. Clearly, this guy was shagging and snorting way beyond his means if he couldn’t afford to pay for it all on an MP’s salary.”

Following the apparent abduction, there were claims that Froderingham had been seen loitering around Soho after dark, offering his sexual services in return for money. “It seemed unlikely, at first, that a serving MP would be touting for business in this way,” says Hink. “But the lobby correspondent from the Sunday Bystander was accosted by a rent-boy outside of a bar there and swore that it was Froderingham. But sporting a fake moustache – and he obviously knows him by sight. He also reckoned that his prices were far too high – five hundred quid for a blow job and a grand for a full on shagging – which was why he wasn’t getting much business. T consensus in the news room was that he was touting his own arse around Soho as a part-time rent-boy, in a desperate attempt to make up the missing funds before anyone found out.” But while most political journalist seem to agree with Ponsonby-Smythe that the early hours call was the result of Froderingham being held in some kind of sex dungeon, clapped in irons, no doubt because he was unable to pay his bill ,having been getting whipped on credit for too long, with his hosts now wanting paying. Alternative scenarios have been advanced.

“Personally, I think that the whole rent-boy business wasn’t a consequence of the abduction, but rather its cause,” muses Rudolph Craxler, Chief Political Correspondent of the West Firkham Farmers’ Gazette. “Naturally, the local ‘talent’ wouldn’t have been happy about him encroaching on their territory – especially if he was successfully pulling in punters – and kidnapped him, holding him hostage for money to make up for their lost earnings.” Indeed, Craxler suspects that Froderingham had long been embezzling local party funds to finance his sex-fuelled lifestyle. “According to my local sources, Ponsonby-Smythe had been worried about missing funds for some time before the ransom business,” confides the local reporter. “That’s why he had the party funds stashed away in his own safe, rather than the local party bank account – to which Froderingham had access.” Reginald Moulding, of the Daily Excess, however, believes that the sex angle of the affair is a red-herring, intended to draw attention away from the fact that it is really a financial scandal. “As we at the Excess have stressed from the outset – the real question is just why Ponsonby-Smythe had those funds in his house and why he handed them over so willingly – after all, wouldn’t any normal person report the whole thing to the police rather than paying a ransom?” he asks. “It seems quite clear that the story about Froderingham being held for ransom was simply a smokescreen to cover up his and Ponsonby-Smythe’s misappropriation of party funds.”

Hink isn’t surprised that the Tory supporting press, like the Excess, are keen to characterise the whole incident as a financial scandal rather than a sex scandal. “They’ve become so used to sex scandals involving male prostitutes, whips and bondage, that they no longer shock the Tories. Let’s face it, at least half of their MPs appear to be sex offenders and deviants,” he points out. “Besides, money is their sex – acquiring it, by any means, is better than an orgasm for the average Tory MP, so is it any wonder that ‘abuse’ of it is what shocks them? Especially when it is party funds being abused – if it was some public body or working class oik being robbed or ripped off, then they’d doubtless applaud.” For its part, the Conservative Party has assured the public that it is fully investigating allegations of embezzlement against Froderingham and have, in the meantime, withdrawn the whip from him. “Quite right,” opines Hink. “Denying him free whippings is about the best punishment they can impose on him.”