Agreed on the dislike of moralists (who are, for the record, mainly older women with the occasional white knight sprinkled in). The Puritan/Calvinist legacy is still alive in many parts of the Anglosphere (most strongly the USA, but also the UK as you can see), and the world is not a better place for it.
Its really their hypocrisy that gets to me. You set the age of consent at 16, indicating that at this time a person is capable of reasonably and rationally consenting to sex.
You cannot then turn around and claim moral outrage when said person engages in sex with someone much older than they are. Either this person is capable of making a decision of their own free will (which we and the law are thus bound to respect), or they aren't. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. She made a choice that the law says she is fully capable of making and he did nothing illegal or wrong in getting involved with her.
Of course, this is a moot point to the old women who (thanks to their accounting for 85% of our spending and essentially driving our consumer-dependent economies) dominate public opinion in the USA and the UK. They'll skewer him just because he's an older man with a much younger woman. The media will play to this along with other politicians because these women do most of the watching, buying and voting these days-their word counts more than anyone else's. Simple as that.
As bad as this is, though, he'd be dealing with much worse here in the USA. There, he merely loses his seat. Here, Nancy Grace and the rest of the talking heads throughout our media would be leading a crusade to throw him in prison, and there's a good chance they'd win given our laws.
Also, she isn't that hot, really. Beats a woman his age, sure, but still: