Keith Vaz should step down as an MP, the UK doesn’t need blatant hypocrites making our laws

KEITH Vaz is Parliament’s slipperiest ­customer. Even so, a male prostitutes-and-cocaine scandal ought to be fatal for his future as an MP.

His long career has been one of ­opportunist grandstanding, disastrous ­misjudgment and murky allegations that have failed to stick.

It is incredible he still managed to ascend to the chairmanship of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

And it is a mark of Vaz’s ocean-going arrogance that he didn’t immediately quit in shame yesterday.

The reliably dim Jeremy Corbyn dismisses it all as a “private matter”. How?

A man presiding over a key Commons committee investigating UK law on drugs and prostitution is caught allegedly offering to buy cocaine while ­paying for sex with two male escorts.

It is unarguably in the public’s interest to see the back of him.

Britain can do better than have such blatant hypocrites making our laws.

Leicester’s voters deserve better too.

Ignore Obama

IT’S not up to Barack Obama whether ­Britain is at the back of the queue for signing a trade deal with the US.

He won’t be President much longer.

Which is not to say Hillary Clinton — still his likely successor — will think ­differently. But if she wins, she and the US Congress have to deal with reality.

America can waste yet more time trying to make a deal with the EU and its squabbling member states, even though three years of talks have hit a dead end.

Or it can decide to sign one with its strongest global partner, closest ally and the world’s fifth biggest economy, acting alone and champing at the bit.

Obama says he has no regrets about warning us off Brexit. He should, since it was his foolish aggression that made some Leave voters’ minds up.

His G20 remarks yesterday sounded like another pout on behalf of a global elite that still hasn’t even tried to understand why Britain voted as it did on June 23.

The main point

THOSE who backed Brexit must not get bogged down defending the points-based immigration system Vote Leave talked up.

Theresa May is against it because the evidence shows it won’t work for Britain. It increased immigration in Australia, as indeed it was designed to do.

It may be that here a visa system for all immigrants proves more effective.

What is crucial — and encouraging — is that Mrs May is not wavering from her commitment to regain control over immigration, however it is done.

Leaving the EU gives us that power for the first time since 1992.

For all the talk of the difficulty of keeping UK-EU trade intact without free movement, the PM must not budge on it.