Shared Opinion | 31 October 2009

Watch what you say. There may be people around who haven’t really been listening

‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees,’ said the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage last week, ‘but we’re going to have a f–—g good paralympic team in 2012.’ Odd to see Patrick Mercer, of all people, calling on him to resign. From what, though? From leaving the house? Maybe Mercer thought this self-employed stand-up comedian was somebody else. Some sort of junior minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, perhaps. Scottish, obviously, with a name like Jimmy. Maybe one of those fat ones who used to hang around with Michael Martin, who all have faces like sanctimonious haemorrhoids. ‘He said what? Well, he should bloody resign. Like I had to.’

You remember Patrick Mercer? He’s a former soldier and a Tory MP, and he was the first person to be sacked from David Cameron’s front bench. His big offence was to use the word ‘nigger’. He didn’t use it in a terribly bad way, although he did not, alas, plead a rap defence. He just mentioned that he’d heard it said a few times as a soldier and hadn’t, in the general scheme of things, felt this to be a terribly big deal. Bang. Gone within a week. Not because he’d offended any actual black people, as far as one could tell, but more because a whole brigade of other people sprang up and started shrieking that he could have done. People vicariously offended on the behalf of others. People, it turns out, a bit like Patrick Mercer.

I’m working on a theory about this sort of thing. It’s pretty fresh and it could probably do with a bit of fine-tuning, but it is basically that anybody who ever calls upon anybody else to resign is wrong and stupid and a faffing hysterical moron.