Are we so short of rent boys we have to import them?

Rent boy scandal ...

REACTION to The Sun’s exclusive revelations about the Labour MP and the Brazilian rent boy has ranged from indifference to indignation.

Predictably, the BBC — which filled its boots with stories about “Tory sleaze” — ignored it completely.

The Guardian cited it as grounds for a new privacy law.

Now there’s a surprise.

But even Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph, ancestral home of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, thought it worth no more than six paragraphs on page nine.

The story, you will recall, concerns Labour MP Clive Betts and a rent boy called Jose Gasparo, whom he picked up in a smelly homosexual brothel called Villa Gianni.

Admittedly, the gory details are stomach-churning and perhaps the Telegraph decided to spare its readers every cough and spit out of consideration to already-overloaded cardiac arrest units up and down the country.

These days it is compulsory to preface every comment on such stories with: “I don’t have a problem with his sexuality.”

That’s exactly what the landlord of the Queen’s Head in Betts’ Sheffield Attercliffe constituency felt obliged to say before adding: “... but people won’t be happy about him carrying on with a rent boy.”

Precisely.

Regular readers will know that I couldn’t care less what consenting adults get up to behind closed doors, provided I don’t have to watch, participate or pay for it through my taxes.

This case breaches the third of those cardinal principles. Betts put his rent boy on the public payroll as a researcher. He also tried to get him a Commons pass.

That is a fundamental abuse of office by an MP. Just as it was when Tory MP David Shaw hired hooker Pamella Bordes as his researcher a few years ago.

There was all hell to pay over the Shaw story. And rightly so.

Yet many of the same people who were screaming blue murder about “Tory sleaze” back then are either keeping their mouths shut or condemning The Sun for having the audacity to publish the Betts revelations.

This is another illustration of the pervasive influence of the militant gay lobby.

They are trying to turn this sordid tale into an issue about Betts’ sexuality — just as they did when George Michael was arrested for masturbating in a public toilet in Los Angeles and Labour’s Ron Davies was caught with his trousers down cruising Clapham Common for rough trade.

And we haven’t even got to Mandy and Reinaldo yet.

This isn’t about sexuality, it is about proper behaviour and morality.

Do Betts’ constituents want their MP shacked up with a Brazilian rent boy, 30 years his junior, whom he picked up in a filthy knocking shop in one of the less salubrious parts of London?

Is it right that an MP should employ his rent boy lover as a researcher at taxpayers’ expense and attempt to get him a Commons security pass?

There are other legitimate questions, too. On what grounds is Gasparo living in Britain? Are we so short of rent boys that we have to import them?

Has Clive Betts made any attempts to pull strings to gain permission for Gasparo to stay here?

And while we’re at it, what is it about Brazilian boys?

I’ve always associated “having a Brazilian” with Essex Wives, not Labour MPs.

We are entitled to ask. We’ve still never had a satisfactory answer to — I hesitate to say “got to the bottom of” — the question about whether Peter Mandelson’s Brazilian boyfriend was given special treatment because he was the lover of a prominent Labour politician.

I have said time and again that I would have been asking the same questions had Mandelson been a Tory minister and Reinaldo a Brazilian flamenco dancer called Reinalda.

The same applies to Betts.

Can you imagine how those now claiming “it’s all about his sexuality” would be howling if this were a 53-year-old Conservative backbencher and a scuzzy, 20-year-old hooker he picked up at the back of King’s Cross station?

Betts’ apologists are the ones for whom it is “all about sexuality”.

It is about the right of homosexuals to do what they like, regardless of the rules and regardless of common decency.

And it stinks like the inside of Villa Gianni.