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Welcome to The View from 22 podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman, the spectators assistant editor.

In this week's issue, we'll be discussing the changing face of political scandals,

David Cameron's exit strategy as Prime Minister and the Pope's difficulty with divorce.

So first, why aren't political scandals as good as they used to be? In recent days, politicians

have been bending over backwards to release their tax returns. But does anyone really care

about David Cameron's dad's tax affairs? I'm joined by Matthew Paris, who has written a book

about great parliamentary scandals to discuss. So Matthew,

Richard Littlejohn says in his piece in This Week's Spectator that the tax scoop on the

Panama papers shows we may have come a long way from the days of the Profumo affair. Is that

true? Yes, I think I think it probably is. I don't think sex has the cachet that it used to.

We were all very repressed in the age of profumo. I guess Richard was

around even then. And when you're repressed, things are exciting. We're not so repressed on

sexual matters now. So I don't think it's so exciting. We seek new fields of excitement and

appear to have found them in taxation. So have we forgotten what a scandal really is?

No, I don't think so.

I think the human instinct for scandal,

the human love of being aghast,

but deliciously aghast at the misdoings of other people,

is as old as man.

But we will swing our searchlight

towards different areas of human imperfection. And for quite a long time,

...