DAILY MAIL: Five years ago I spent several weeks in Zimbabwe reporting on the way that President Mugabe was brutalising his people, in part thanks to the inertia and complicity of the Tony Blair government.
After I returned, Sir Patrick Cormack, a Conservative Party backbencher, invited me to his room. He wanted to ask what questions he should put to a government minister who would soon be giving evidence on Zimbabwe to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, of which he was a member.
So I told Cormack about a strange event that had occurred the previous month. President Mugabe had been invited to Paris by President Chirac for a summit meeting. This example of European approval of a barbarous dictator caused uproar.
When Downing Street was asked about the episode, it gave the impression to reporters that it had neither been consulted nor informed, while ministers spoke out angrily against the invitation.
In fact I was able to show Cormack evidence that the British government had known all along about the invitation, raised not the slightest objection, that its protestations of ignorance were false, and that the angry pronouncements by ministers were no better than a cynical device. I suggested to Cormack that he should expose this wretched business at the Foreign Affairs Committee, and offered to draft him a list of questions.
Sir Patrick gazed around his large and beautifully appointed Commons office. He looked appalled. "Oh, I could never do that," he stated. "It might embarrass the Government."
Since then I have often noted Sir Patrick nod with vigorous approval from the Conservative side as Tony Blair spoke from the dispatch box. I have seen him cross the floor of the House to offer sympathy and support to a government minister in trouble.
I have also been reliably told that he wrote a letter of rebuke to a younger Tory MP in a neighbouring constituency who attacked the Government. "That is not the sort of thing we do in Staffordshire," declared Cormack.
Cormack has his fans who believe that he represents a 'civilised' kind of politics. I cannot agree. Voters put their MPs into Parliament to represent their interests and articulate their concerns, and sometimes anger, not to form part of a comfortable club, or to collude with opposition parties.
Sir Patrick is one of hundreds of Members of Parliament who now belong to a Political Class that has become entrenched at the centre of British politics, government and society.
This new Political Class has emerged over the past three decades to become the dominant force in British public life - and increasingly pursues its own sectional interests oblivious to the public good.
It encompasses lobbyists, party functionaries, advisers and spindoctors, many journalists, and increasing numbers of onceindependent civil servants. All mainstream politicians of the three main parties belong to it. Gordon Brown is a member, so is the Tory leader David Cameron.
Indeed, as the case of Sir Patrick Cormack shows, MPs from different parties now have far more in common with each other, as members of the Political Class, than they have with voters. They seek to protect one another, help each other out, rather than engage in robust democratic debate.
As a result, the House of Commons is no longer really a cockpit where great conflicts of vision are fought out across the chamber. It has converted instead into a professional group, like the Bar Council or the British Medical Association.
This means that the most important division in Britain is no longer the Tory versus Labour dividing line that marked out the battle zone in politics for the bulk of the 20th century. The real division is between a narrow, self-serving and - as we will see - increasingly corrupt Political Class and the mass of ordinary voters. PETER OBORNE: The rise of the sleaze-ocrats in Britain's ruling class (more)
Mark Alexander
