Was a serial killer allowed to exploit young men in the heart of Westminster for 20 years?

Chris Pincher was the man Boris Johnson tasked with investigating sex allegations and maintaining discipline in his ruling Conservative Party. Now Pincher has reportedly been accused in more than a dozen new reports of allegedly groping, touching and making inappropriate advances. The hideous cavalcade of allegations against Pincher has put pressure on Johnson’s administration, which was already facing something of an accountability problem.

The final rounds of disclosures about Pincher, which he denies, began last week. A report in The sun said Pincher got drunk at a private club in London and groped two men. This would be inexcusable for a legislator at any point in his career, but – if proven – Pincher’s role in government would make it all the more shocking; He was Deputy Chief Whip, a job that includes maintaining discipline within his party and investigating allegations of sexual misconduct against its politicians. “I drank way too much last night,” Pincher wrote in a letter to Boris Johnson, who was stepping down from the role. “I have embarrassed myself and others, which is the last thing I want to do, and for that I apologize to you and those affected.”

Most allegations are anonymous and there have been no reports of a police investigation into the allegations.

It was annoying, but perhaps not entirely surprising, that Boris Johnson – a man who has had his share of sex scandals under his belt – initially allowed Pincher to continue serving as a Tory lawmaker. Only 24 hours after the groping scandal broke, Johnson suspended Pincher from the party on Friday afternoon, when an accompanying parliamentary inquiry into his behavior was also announced. But if that should end the affair, a blast of new allegations over the weekend blew things up again.

At least 13 new allegations of sexual misconduct and other abuses of power against Pincher over a ten-year period have been reported in the UK media in recent days. The earliest is believed to have happened in 2013, when a parliamentary researcher said Pincher threatened to report her to her boss after she tried to stop Pincher from molesting a young man at the Conservative Party convention. That same year, another man says, they woke up to find Pincher lying on him after a night out in his London flat. A charity worker even shared it The sun that he was being groped by Pincher in a photo of them taken in 2018. Another report Monday from someone who says they were groped by Pincher in 2021 is now planning to go to the police with his allegation. And an alleged male victim says he was groped twice by Pincher, most recently in June this year. Pincher has denied all allegations and says he is seeking professional medical help.

The stories of wrongdoing go back even further than the reports that surfaced over the weekend. In 2001, Pincher was alleged to have been inappropriate towards Olympic rower and Tory activist Alex Story. In a public account of the incident in 2017, athlete compared Pincher to Harvey Weinstein when describing the incident, in which Story said Pincher wore a robe, massaged his neck, and whispered in his ear, “You’re going to go far in.” of the Conservative Party.”

The storm of chilling allegations has also raised questions about how Boris Johnson allowed someone with a reputation like Pincher’s to take a key role in government. “The Prime Minister was not aware of any specific allegation prior to the appointment and there was no basis for stopping the appointment,” a Johnson spokesman said Politically last week. But two unnamed Tory lawmakers said so The guard They had raised concerns about Pincher with the whip office in February of that year. And Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings tweeted Saturday that Johnson “repeatedly laughed at him in No. 10 as ‘pincher by name, pincher by nature,’ long before he appointed him.”

Depressingly, this is just the latest scandal to rock Johnson’s party. The Prime Minister himself has recently been the subject of salacious stories after truly harrowing details emerged about a politician who walked into Johnson and his then-lover and now-wife Carrie in a “compromising situation” at his office when he was foreign secretary in 2018, and Johnson’s party suffered recently a crushing electoral defeat caused in part by one of its MPs, Neil Parish, being caught watching porn in the House of Commons (Parish claimed he was looking for tractors when he came across the x-rated video). And, of course, the sex allegations have come while the UK is still reeling from the Partygate scandal, which has seen Johnson and his associates break their own pandemic lockdown rules to attend alcoholic parties at Downing Street.