MONTREAL—The latest twists in the Senate scandal raise almost as many questions about the political management of the government as they do about the spending ways of the upper house.

Conservative strategists have spent the past two years putting as much distance as possible between the prime minister and a Senate dominated by his hand-picked appointees.

Harper has not filled a single Senate vacancy since the scandal broke out.

He has punted every opposition query as to his role in the handling of the file to the courts, the RCMP and/or the auditor general.

He has declined to comment on the tug-of-war between disgraced senator Mike Duffy’s defence team and the Senate’s gatekeepers.

He has refrained from giving any hints as to the way forward in a depleted upper house.

After the Supreme Court ruled that there could be no Senate reform without constitutional negotiations with the provinces, he set aside his party’s long-standing commitment to overhaul the institution.

Now, Harper will be spending the next predictably stormy week as physically removed from the Senate front line as possible.

The first leaks of the long-awaited audit of senators’ spending on Thursday night found the prime minister packing his bags for a weeklong European tour.

Harper won’t be back in the House of Commons until mid-June, which means that someone else will have to deal with the initial onslaught of opposition questions.

But even an ocean is unlikely to put enough distance from Harper from the latest instalment of the Senate scandal.

For it turns out that, even as the prime minister was struggling to keep the Senate issue at arm’s length with one hand, he and his advisers were bringing the spending scandal back in-house with the other.

With more than 50 Conservative senators at his disposal, Harper managed to task two of the upper house members singled out by the auditor general for questionable spending with cleaning up the place.

Leo Housakos was named Speaker of the Senate only a few weeks ago.

In that role, one of his first acts was to work with government house leader Claude Carignan and his opposition counterpart James Cowan to arrange an appeals process for the senators whose expenses are flagged by the auditor general.

Give the Senate leadership credit for giving an innovative meaning to the notion of leading by example; the three of them will be using the arbitration process they put in place to try to get off the auditor general’s hook.

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One consequence of trusting the Quebec duo of Housakos and Carignan with the post-audit management of the Conservative Senate is that it brings Harper and his office further into a loop that he spent two years trying to get out of.

Another is to give the issue more profile in Quebec.

Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu is one of two current members of the upper house whose spending the auditor general is referring to the RCMP. (The other is Liberal senator Colin Kenny.)

Boisvenu has been Harper’s law-and-order point man in Quebec for five years. He is one of his highest-profile Senate appointments from that province.

On Thursday, he followed Pamela Wallin, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau out of the Conservative caucus. He now sits as an Independent.

In Harper’s centralized Conservative operation, admission to the partisan speaking circuit is controlled from the top.

At what point does it stop being a coincidence that the Harper appointees whose names are brought to the attention of the RCMP happen to be some of the most prominent on the party’s speaking roster?

Since chief-of-staff Nigel Wright left the PMO over his dealings with Duffy, Harper has put the political management of the government in the hands of a core group of fierce loyalists.

They in turn have tended to place their trust in like-minded partisans to man the Conservative front line in question period, at the negotiating table of the election debates . . . and in the Senate.

In most instances, they have made matters worse.

By all indications, Harper’s palace guard still enjoys his confidence, but that is less and less true of a growing number of his MPs as they uneasily watch Conservative fortunes decline, the ministerial talent pool of the government dry up and a flock of Senate chickens come home to roost.

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