Rifkind's Kensington seat up for grabs - but beware jinx

So, with the walls closing in, Sir Malcolm Rifkind has done the decent thing. Not only has he stood down as chair of the Commons Intelligence and Secutrity Committee, but as Conservative MP for Kensington too.

Having had the Tory whip removed yesterday by Michael Gove while an investigation decides whether he committed any wrong-doing, it was going to be very difficult for Kensington Conservatives because, technically, he was no longer a Conservative MP.

In a personal statement issued this morning, Rifkind conceded that it was "unlikely that it [the investigation] will be able to finish its deliberations until well into March and there, obviously, can be no certainty as to its conclusions. I am conscious, therefore, that Kensington Conservatives are faced with serious uncertainty until the end of March as to whether I will be able to be their candidate."

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Rifkind said he had intended to stand one last time in Kensington before retiring. Instead, he leaves now under cloud - and he is by no means the first Tory MP in this constituency to do so.

As Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail pointed out on Sky News last night, Nick Scott was de-selected as the Kensington and Chelsea MP in 1997 after being found drunk in the gutter at the Tory party conference.

He was hurriedly replaced by the womanising Alan Clark who boasted of bedding a former judge’s wife and her two daughters. After Clark died, K and C adopted carpetbagger Michael Portillo, hotfoot from his memorable defeat in Enfield Southgate in 1997.

Portillo quit Kensington and politics in 2005 after failing to beat Iain Duncan Smith for the Tory leadership. Rifkind then got the seat, and continued to hold it after Kensington and Chelsea became just plain Kensington in 2010.

It's bad luck on Boris Johnson who, rumour has it, desperately wanted Kensington when he decided last year to return to Westminster - but had to make do with Uxbridge and South Ruislip when Riflkind refused to step aside. Still, perhaps he's done well to escape the jinx.

Number Ten will be relieved that Rifkind is finally off. There was apparently alarm that he was refusing yesterday to go quietly, with David Cameron desperate to distance the Tory election campaign from the 'cash for access' scandal.

Whether Rifkind and his fellow 'stingee' Jack Straw actually broke any parliamentary rules has yet to be discovered: but their behaviour in front of the secret cameras was enough to leave a very nasty taste in the public mouth.

Rifkind's departure from the Intelligence and Security Committee comes as a relief, too. His predecessor in the role, Labour’s Kim Howells, made it clear on Newsnight that Rifkind had to step down to stop the committee “being dragged down”.

The committee, which reports directly to the Prime Minister, is so secret that its meetings are held in camera and rarely publicised. Howells feared its role in providing oversight of Britain’s spooks would be damaged by the knowledge that its chairman was stupid enough to get caught in a media sting that was as obvious as an old Soviet honey-trap.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports today that Straw is poised to take a job after he steps down as an MP with a furniture firm, Senator International, for whom he successfully lobbied to get government contracts.

He may not have broken any rules, but as Andrew Pierce told Sky News: “It stinks.”