THE recent fate of a Picasso painting reminded me of how one rotten bunch — bankers — have their friends in Parliament.

Spanish banker Jaime Botin owns a Picasso painting, “Head of a young woman.” It was painted in 1906, before Picasso really cut loose into cubism, so it wouldn’t be my favourite.

But the Spanish are very proud of everything Picasso painted. They consider this painting a national cultural treasure. So Botin is banned from taking the £17 million painting out of Spain. 

Rules, however, are for little people. French authorities believe Botin was trying to ship the painting off to Switzerland, in defiance of a court order.

They boarded Botin’s yacht, which had already left Spanish waters and was moored off the French island of Corsica, and seized the painting from Botin’s boat. Spanish police have flown it back to Madrid, where it is held in the national museum. 

Botin says he isn’t covered by the Spanish laws about the painting, because its official address is his London-registered yacht. It’s a very personal version of the bankers’ standard attempt to evade national laws by moving things “offshore.” Botin is arguing that the Spanish rules don’t cover his Picasso because it lives offshore on his yacht.

Just put the banker and his yacht and his Picasso aside for a moment.

We are currently in the odd situation of having a Prime Minister who is simultaneously the biggest critic of lobbying and the biggest friend to lobbyists.

In 2010 David Cameron gave a speech saying corporate lobbying was “the next big scandal waiting to happen.”

But within days of Cameron’s re-election, he made George Bridges a Cabinet Office minister. Bridges hadn’t bothered to get elected, so Cameron also had to give Bridges a House of Lords seat.

Bridges is a friend of George Osborne. He ran Tory research and campaigns departments in the 2000s. But in 2010 he founded a lobbying firm, Quiller Consultants.

Under Bridges their clients included privatisers like A4e and Mitie and City interests including HSBC, PwC and the City of London itself. So Cameron, who hates corporate lobbying, has made a corporate lobbyist one of his key ministers, with a brief to advise on the whole “policy agenda.”

As well as being a former lobbyist, Bridges is also a bankers’ friend. Bridges left Quiller in 2013 to become “senior adviser to Ana Botin, group executive chairman of Banco Santander.”

Jaime Botin, the banker with the yacht and the Picasso, is Ana Botin’s uncle. Of course, she is not responsible for his yacht-Picasso games. But she is certainly close to her family. Her dad, Emilio Botin, and her “offshore” uncle, were both Santander bosses before her. The bank is a family firm, not a meritocracy.

And her own record is pretty grim too. Ana Botin was CEO of Santander in Britain from 2010 to 2014 in charge when the bank experienced a series of fines and scandals for cheating customers.

Santander set aside £538m to refund missold PPI in 2012 — an underestimate as they had to put aside another £20m for missold PPI this year.

In 2014 Santander was fined £12.4m for not telling the truth to the customers who bought risky investment bonds.

Santander targeted the over-60s for investments, falsely telling them they would “likely double” their money. Around 300,000 customers invested in these risky bonds which were sold as safe. In 2012 Santander were fined £1.5m for misdescribing “structured bonds” sold to better-off clients.

So the yacht-Picasso affair reminded me that we have the former assistant to a bank boss connected to all the fines and rip-offs of the banking industry at the heart of our government. And nobody voted for him.

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LOUISE MENSCH says she “cried” when the Conservatives won back her old Corby seat in the general election. But the Labour MP who replaced her in the 2012 by-election, and then lost the seat again, seems to be laughing all the way to the bank.

Mensch says she was “thrilled” and driven to tears when Conservative Tom Pursglove unseated Labour’s Andy Sawford in May. Mensch might have been feeling guilty because Labour won the seat in the first place because she abandoned it, standing down to go to New York in 2012 to spend more time with her money.

However, Sawford doesn’t seem that bothered about losing the seat himself: he has walked out of the Commons and straight into a new job as a boss of leading lobbying firm Connect Public Affairs.

Five weeks after being kicked out by the electorate Sawford said he was joining Connect and “was delighted to be offered the opportunity to return to work with them as CEO. Connect is a great company. In my view it is the best in the business and is primed for even greater success and growth in the years ahead.” So losing his seat wasn’t such a bad thing.

Connect say they can — for a price — help clients “engage with and build relationships with your most important political advocates. We know how to ensure your voice is heard by those who count.”

Here are a few of the clients who can get their voices “heard” with the former Labour MP’s help: privatised utility British Gas; the European Azerbaijan Society, representatives of that nation’s authoritarian ruling elite; and Essential Living, a developer that wants to build private tower blocks and rent them to Londoners in a conscious effort to exploit “generation rent.” Essential Living also employs Tory former housing minister Mark Prisk.

The Corby seat shows our Parliament sliding back to the kind of rottenness of the early 19th century, with seats either represented by rich hobbyists like Mensch, who might wander off at any moment, or hired guns like Sawford, who seem as happy representing foreign dictators or exploitative firms for cash as they do representing voters in Parliament.