In today’s TCW, four of our writers react to the latest bout of Parliamentary sleaze stories.
SO we are still talking about Angela Rayner’s legs and intentions, or at least the Mail on Sunday is.
I don’t want to be talking about it, you don’t want me talking about it, but they won’t let this story go away. Other stories that will not go away are Beergate (that’s Labour in breach of lockdown story) and Cakegate (that’s Tories in breach of lockdown story). Yesterday the Sunday Times informed us that the ‘Commons have a cosy culture of debauchery’ – yet the Telegraph told us that the Conservatives are going to send in more women to clean up the mess: in future half of Tory MPs will have to be women. That’s all-women shortlists on the way, I assume.
Let’s look at Commons sleaze as seen by the press. Currently three cabinet ministers and two shadow cabinet ministers are among 56 MPs reportedly facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Further, the 2019 intake of MPs have ‘adopted a freshers’ week mentality to socialising’ and ‘one insider said that in recent weeks an MP had become so drunk on champagne that they had been escorted from the Pugin Room, one of the most opulent hospitality venues in Parliament. The source also said that a female researcher had consumed so much alcohol that she vomited over a parliamentary bar. She was later found unconscious outside the room.’
So while the media go into overdrive to bring the sex and drink stories, and we have to wade through loads of pieces by female lobby journalists telling us how harassed they are, it is important, dear reader, very important, not to miss the key point.
The key point, the most important issue, the incredibly obvious fact, is that these drunken, porn-watching fools were also MPs who put us in the lockdown – that all MPs were party to. Virtually to a man and woman. Did any resist? Not one female name springs to mind.
That’s what we should be angry about – that these fools in Clown Town went along with Johnson and Gove and the ‘experts’ when they decided to wreck the economy, destroy the university years of an entire generation and ruin the mental health of our kids and their education. And no, I’m not going to stop going on about it. Neither should you.
The rising generation have been completely screwed by these compliant clowns, women you’d have thought would have been a bit more attentive to the needs and interests of children and the next generation. But no. Not at all. Shame on them.
As Yasmin Choudhury wrote in the Sunday Times yesterday: ‘The usual difficulties of entering the workforce have been magnified for the Covid-hit classes of 2020 and 2021. Their studies were interrupted, students had to isolate in their halls of residence paying full fees and graduated with large loans into a job market that still has not recovered. Although the overall unemployment rate is 3.8 per cent, it is 11.3 per cent for those between 16 and 24.’
If I had a kid that age I’d be angry, very angry at far more than Sir Keir Starmer’s Beergate hypocrisy – I’d be furious that he provided absolutely no opposition, despite being Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, when Boris Johnson took a wrecking ball to this country. In fact, all Labour ever wanted was harder, earlier, and more miserable lockdowns. Lock them down harder was Starmer’s manifesto.
No wonder the so-called ‘experts’ were running the show. You can’t give much push back to the mad professors of Sage if you are mainlining the porn and knocking back pints, can you? These MPs are paid to serve us. They are not paid to screw up our lives and the lives of our children. But they did nothing while Johnson went full Covid hysteria.
There were a few notable exceptions: Sir Christopher Chope, Steve Baker MP, Mark Harper MP, Esther McVey, Charles Walker and Graham Brady MP (it’s always Brady there, trying to keep a lid on the clown behaviour and yes, these courageous few are mostly men) plus a few others who had the balls to go on TV and provide some opposition to the lockdown destruction. But there weren’t enough.
Would more women MPs improve things? I’m not holding my breath.
