Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Haunted by an honourable member

The honourable member that he pinged into cyberspace is now dive-bombing me in my bed

I was awoken late on Monday night by a horrible nightmare, one of those dreams where you cannot be entirely sure if you are asleep or not. I dreamed I was lying exactly where I was, in my bed, and this torpedo-shaped, phantasmagorical thing was zipping about around the bedroom, diving behind the wardrobe, reappearing and hovering for a moment by the window, and then shooting off towards the landing. Then it would dive at great velocity towards where I was lying, before suddenly veering off.

What was this chimeric object? I realised immediately, with a chilling clarity — it was Brooks Newmark’s penis, jubilantly detached from the rest of Brooks Newmark. It had a very perky look on its face — yes, it had a face — as I tried to swat it away, my hands flailing at the abstracted, rocket-propelled organ. Eventually I woke up drenched in sweat and gasping, and rather selfishly roused my wife for comfort. ‘I’ve had a nightmare,’ I told her, still shaking a little. She drowsily sighed and said: ‘It wasn’t Brooks Newmark’s penis again, was it? I thought we’d seen the last of that.’

Yes, me too, me too. But nightmares very often recur, don’t they? All it needs is something buried deep in your unconsciousness and, crucially, a trigger. In this case the trigger had been pulled earlier that day, I now remembered.

Brooks Newmark is the American-born Conservative MP who was caught in a sting operation two years ago this week. A male journalist posing online as a pneumatic babe, a Tory ‘PR girl’, sent him sexually explicit selfies and Brooks, being Brooks, was only too happy to reciprocate. Mr Newmark pinged his honourable member across cyberspace and thus, in doing so, ended his own career and indeed, it seemed at the time, marriage.

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