How do you like your members of parliament? Do you prefer them to be vacuous automatons devoid of wit, humour and anything one might call emotion? Or do you actually prefer them to be people, a little like yourself? Prone to human frailties from time to time, rather than being a deracinated good Boy Scout who would be as interesting, conversationally, as a pamphlet from your local health authority trust?
This question occurred to me when I read of the sacking of the junior minister Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP for somewhere awful called Gorton and Denton. Not just sacked, mind, but suspended from the Labour party. A similar fate befell a man I had hitherto been unaware existed – Oliver Ryan, the MP for the diverse and vibrant community we know as ‘Burnley’. A bunch of Lancashire Labour councillors have been suspended too, all for what they said to each other on a WhatsApp messaging group called ‘Trigger Me Timbers’.
The comments made by Gwynne have routinely attracted that very au courant and perhaps overused epithet ‘vile’. Gwynne has done that equally au courant thing and issued a grovelling apology, which somehow people think is more commendable than standing up for yourself and fighting your corner.
Gwynne’s remarks on that private messaging group were not what I would call ‘vile’. They were simply a few slivers of black humour regarding people who had got on his nerves. So, for example, he said of one constituent: ‘Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. P.S. Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.’ He also expressed a wish that another constituent, a cyclist, would be ‘mown down’ by a lorry, made ‘sexualised’ comments about the Deputy Prime Minister (any port in a storm, I suppose) and referred to Diane Abbott as a ‘joke’, which I think we have all done on a fairly regular basis these past 30 years.
Magazine articles are subscriber-only. Keep reading for just £1 a month
SUBSCRIBE TODAY- Free delivery of the magazine
- Unlimited website and app access
- Subscriber-only newsletters
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in