The hunt for Gloria De Piero's topless photos serves one purpose: discrediting her

Who are the people in parliament today? Well, of the 650 MPs, 20 (19 Conservative and one Lib Dem) went to Eton. Twenty-seven come from ethnic minorities; 147 are women. And at least one of them has posed topless for money.

If you haven't been following the saga of shadow minister Gloria De Piero's breasts this week, here it is in a nutshell bikini: she got them out for money when she was 15 years old and living in poverty, she was questioned about it during the 2010 election campaign, and she announced two days ago on her personal blog that a news agency "acting on behalf of a national publication" was offering a hefty sum for access to the pictures. Clearly, this was not because said news outlet needed racy pictures, stat, and all the glamour models were booked up. It was not for personal fetishistic reasons or because the editors were cashing in on the past success of Zoo magazine's infamous "Diamond Boobilee" edition by collating their own "best of British boobs" with a political twist. Alas, there is only one real reason a newspaper wanted Gloria De Piero's breasts: in order to discredit her.

Of course, this tiresome tactic has been following professional women around like a bad smell ever since they stepped out of the kitchen ("Stop that particle physics demonstration immediately! I've heard the lecturer was once a total whore!&quot Naked photographs are the favoured blackmailing tool of modern society, from the boardrooms of the most powerful tabloids right down to the hacked Snapchats in the schoolyard. Despite the fact that most of us who venture into the world wide web on a daily basis wouldn't bat a desensitised eyelid at "Dirty Cumsluts IV: Grandma Gets Horny" getting advertised in the corner of our smartphone screens, we know that tangible proof a female MP once showed her nips in public is enough to embarrass her out of politics for ever. We were all up in arms about losing access to violent porn, so why in another context do we become so instantly prudish?

Put simply, the topless teenager doesn't fit that eternal image of a politician that exists in our public consciousness. A politician is a certain kind of person, one who is either truly squeaky clean or – more likely – artfully adept at PRing their own past misdemeanours. We can just about forgive the Bullingdon Club member who explains away his money-burning and wanton destruction of property as shameful juvenile behaviour, who recasts his errors as raucous childish idiocy that he learned from before he became a pinnacle of traditional morality. But we are much less likely to accept the unapologetic statement of De Piero that "I have talked about why I posed for those photos in interviews before. I thought at the time it was a way of improving my circumstances. This is part of my story and part of who I am." She is not, after all, presenting herself as a one-time tearaway converted to the straight and narrow, to the "political path". Instead, she is saying: topless teenagers are politicians too. I haven't fundamentally changed, and I don't need to.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/18/gloria-de-piero-topless-pictures-hunt-politicians