Aidan Burley's parting gift to his party

Somewhere, the world's smallest violin is playing a tune for Aidan Burley, who complains of being paid £67,000 a year and about 'rude' constituents.

The MP had deleted his Twitter account before he gave his final speech in the Commons. He is clearly ready to head off to pastures new.

Mr Burley, sadly, used it to whinge about his constituents, the 'lower' pay (well over twice the national average wage) and the intrusion of the media.

He praised those who stood by him through difficult times.

Those difficult times, of course, were arguably self-inflicted. Google his name and the word 'Nazi' pops up too as a result of an infamous Alpine stag party at the end of 2011, which he attended as a guest and where the groom wore a uniform banned in the country where they were staying.

He never lived it down.

His thanks to his wife Jodie should have been poignant and touching. Instead they were tinged with bitterness as he said she had been 'dealing with some of the most complex cases and often the rudest and most awkward constituents'.

Those rude constituents are the same people the new Tory candidate, Amanda Milling, will need to keep on side. Many will be the voters who had previously backed Labour and were giving the Tories a go.

His criticism of media intrusion might normally bring little support. After all, the reason the media was interested in him was because of his own poor judgment. But some reports that dragged Mrs Burley into the debate, using pictures from Facebook of her time at university and presenting normal student parties as something 'racy' were utterly uncalled for.

It was an honest speech.

We must credit Mr Burley with that. Few MPs are prepared to admit the pay simply does not make the hectic, difficult lifestyle worth it for fear of angering constituents who earn far less.

Of course he personally no longer had anything to lose. The Tories in Cannock Chase face the fight of their lives.

Everyone from the Prime Minister to the Chancellor and the Mayor of London descended on it to try to persuade those constituents - rude or otherwise - to stick with them.

If Mr Burley cared about the Tories' chances he might have done better to have just stayed silent and bowed out gracefully.

It is an unfortunate end to what could and should have been a great career.

But it was also a career whose end was nigh as long ago as a stag night in 2011. And Aidan Burley has no-one else to blame for that but himself.