The funniest kind of political self own are the self-inflicted kind and no fewer than 20 Labour MPs fell for this one - the greedy gets! Right, so here’s the thing: when a fake Hong Kong investment firm that doesn’t exist can stroll into Westminster and get meetings with Labour MPs who think they’re about to land a tidy little advisory gig, you stop pretending the problem is subtle. Led By Donkeys and Democracy for Sale didn’t run some clever espionage caper here; they slapped a logo on a made-up company, got the Chamber Group to make the introductions, and watched around twenty MPs treat it like a normal day at the office. And because the sting is this crude, the punchline is obvious: the door wasn’t forced open, it was already ajar, which tells you more about the culture of Parliament than any committee report ever will. So yes, it’s funny, but the joke isn’t on the activists, it’s on the people who treated a company that didn’t even exist as if it were a legitimate route to yet another outside role. Right, so it’s always remarkable how quickly the mask slips in Westminster when you drop the pretence of formality and simply look at what people do when they think nobody is watching, and that’s exactly what has happened here because Led By Donkeys and Democracy for Sale have just run a sting operation so simple, so bare-bones, and so blatant that the only reasonable conclusion you can draw is that Labour MPs — not one or two outliers but a whole cluster of them — are perfectly willing to open the door to a foreign investor they’ve never heard of, with no due diligence, no security questions, and no hesitation about whether any of it looks remotely appropriate. The fake company didn’t need depth, it didn’t need a reputation, it didn’t need a paper trail, it just needed a name, a location, and the right middleman to make the introduction, and once that happened you could see the machinery of Westminster kick in exactly as it always does when the prospect of another paid advisory role is put on the table in front of people who claim to be there for public service. And the thing is, if you strip out the noise and stick to the facts as they stand, the scandal isn’t that the company was fake, it’s that the behaviour would have been exactly the same if the company had been real. So let’s start where the facts sit. A Hong Kong-based investment firm called EC Strategies was invented by Led By Donkeys and Democracy for Sale as part of an undercover test, and the Chamber Group arranged meetings between that fictitious firm and Labour MPs who believed they were meeting a legitimate foreign investor looking for political guidance and possibly paid advisory roles. These MPs sat down — some online, some in follow-ups — and engaged with a representative they assumed was the London face of a powerful international investor, when in reality he was an undercover reporter recording the entire thing.