Out of the frying pan

I am continually astounded by British politics and what people think it’s okay - and not okay - to put up with from their politicians. If I have to read another sensationalist account of Tory Party hopefuls “trying” drugs whilst at university, I’ll probably go insane.

Firstly, the phrase “I tried cannabis once whilst at university” is nothing short of a cliche. It’s the catch-all phrase which means anyone who comes forward to say they saw X or Y smoking pot can be told that it was the one time they tried it. 

Secondly, we can’t expect MPs to be super human. We’re all deeply flawed, we all have demons and it’s only the very blandest of people who don’t have a colourful past. And the last thing we need is bland politicians. Bland politicians like Theresa May, David Cameron and the Millibands say only what they think will keep them in power, then run for the hills when the going gets tough.

Call me a showbiz liberal, but, if I strongly believe that, unless the police are involved, what we do in the privacy of our own houses (and I include extra marital affairs and sexual proclivities here) is only a matter for public discourse if it stops us from doing our job properly or if we show chronic hypocrisy by condemning other people for what we’re secretly doing ourselves. The fall out from John Major’s ghastly Back-to-Basics campaign in the 90s rightly led to the resignation of a number of politicians who simply couldn’t practise what they unwisely attempted to preach.

Because of all this, I think there’s a degree of justification in criticising Gove. I couldn’t give the slightest if he took coke in the 1990s when he was a journalist, but if it’s true that he published stories condemning drugs, someone ought to call him out. I’ve always felt very uneasy at the thought of journalists pretending to be our moral guardians. I wouldn’t trust one as far as I could throw one. 

As far as I’m concerned, all of this talk about drugs is a smoke screen which conceals far more important questions, namely what these Prime Ministerial hopefuls think and believe about the issues which will directly effect ordinary people. What do they think about the environment? Austerity? The arts? Benefits? Human rights...

Some of them, for example, have taken quite brutal anti-LGBT stances. Andrea Leadsome, it seems, abstains on voting on any bill which mentions the words “same sex” and Esther McVee has systematically voted against equality for LGBT people. 

And then, of course, away from the leadership race, on the other side of the house, comes Lisa Forbes, the newly elected Labour MP for Peterborough, who has replaced an MP who went to jail for lying about a speeding ticket. Forbes recently “liked” a brutally antisemitic tweet which linked the mosque shootings in New Zealand to Judaism, whilst accusing Theresa May of having a “Zionism slave master agenda.” We’re told that Forbes liked the tweet without “reading it properly” and therefore, the sordid business is being reported as “careless.” But in a climate where the Labour Party is frantically attempting to distance itself from antisemitism, I genuinely think it’s party faithful SHOULDN’T be careless. Liking a racist or homophobic tweet of this nature would almost certainly have seen Forbes dispatched from her post before she could say “I didn’t read the twe...”

If I’m honest, I think politicians who believe in, or support the promotion of, weird conspiracy theories, are far more worrying than those who took drugs twenty years ago, or, dare I say, someone who lied about a speeding ticket...

Our of the frying pan and into the fire.