A Russian billionaire, a yacht on the Mediterranean, allegations of secret donations and betrayal - all the ingredients the British media needs to start a feeding frenzy.
After being exposed by an old friend, a senior British opposition politician has admitted he met Russia's wealthiest man on his $150 million yacht in the Mediterranean.
The Conservative party's chief spokesman on finance, George Osborne, says he has done nothing illegal.
But the admission he met Oleg Deripaska several times last August, including once on his yacht, has revived an image of the Conservatives as elitist that they have long sought to shed.
The meetings were revealed by an old friend of Mr Osborne's from his days at Oxford University, when they were both members of the Bullingdon Club, an elite dining society.
Nathaniel Rothschild, a fund manager who is heir to a $1.5 billion banking fortune and helped set up the meetings on the island of Corfu, says Mr Osborne used them to try to solicit a large donation to the Conservative party from Deripaska.
Mr Osborne denies seeking any such donation, which would have been illegal as it would have come from a foreign citizen, but has confirmed almost everything else Mr Rothschild says occurred.
Mr Rothschild revealed the meetings in a letter to the Times newspaper, apparently irritated that Mr Osborne had given details to the press of conversations he had on the yacht with another guest, Peter Mandelson, a senior Labour politician.
Mr Rothschild, who is also friends with Mr Mandelson, felt Mr Osborne violated an unwritten code by revealing what was said in private, and decided to point that out in the papers, aggravated that Mr Mandelson was being tarnished for meeting Mr Deripaska.
"Perhaps in future it would be better if all involved accepted the age-old adage that private parties are just that," Mr Rothschild said in a letter from his home in Switzerland.
"It ill behoves all political parties to try and make capital at the expense of another in such circumstances."
But in exposing Mr Osborne's presence on the yacht last summer, Mr Rothschild also made allegations about what Mr Osborne had been doing there, raising the issue of political donations.
"I am surprised that you focus on the fact that one of my guests, Peter Mandelson, is a friend of another, Oleg Deripaska. Not once in the acres of coverage did you mention that George Osborne, who also accepted my hospitality, found the opportunity... to solicit a donation," he wrote.
Mr Rothschild's revelations sparked a storm of tabloid and broadsheet headlines yesterday asking what had really happened on the Mediterranean yacht between the Conservative party politician and the Russian oligarch.