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.
As ever, his biggest mistake was to apologise. He said: ‘I deeply regret my badly misjudged comments and apologise for any offence I’ve caused… I entirely understand the decisions the PM and the party have taken and, while very sad to have been suspended, will support them in any way I can.’ He rather lost my sympathy with that cringing, emetic outburst, but it is what everyone has to do these days so I suppose it’s hardly surprising.
Gwynne’s comments were simply a few slivers of black humour regarding people who had got on his nerves
But for anyone about to find themselves in similar trouble for having done nothing particularly wicked, here’s my tip: never apologise, but rage, rage against the dying of the light, and take as many of the bastards with you as you can manage.
I don’t believe many people really took offence at those comments made on a messaging app that was intended to be entirely private. I think, instead, that there has been a spot of opportunism at work, largely on the part of people who hate the Labour party. ‘Look – that’s what they really think of the people they represent! They even wish death upon them! Typical Labour! They are… vile.’
But the people who say that are lying to us and lying to themselves. Gwynne did not wish death upon those constituents – he was making a joke, along the lines of ‘Hey, how funny would it be if I sent this bloke the following…?’ OK, if you have never uttered a similar sentiment about a colleague or a customer or a mutual enemy, then I suppose you have the right to wallow in sanctimony and castigate Gwynne. But my guess is that pretty much all of you have done exactly that, in which case what we are seeing is double standards. Or for the truly amoral of you, an argument that the rights and wrongs do not matter one bit – when it comes to clobbering the government, everything must be weaponised, even when we know it’s a load of rubbish. Gwynne is guilty not because he made those comments, but because he is a Labour MP – and that’s an end to it. I have no time for the government either, but I still find that argument rancid. Much as I did that silly confection of demanding another general election because some people didn’t like the outcome of the original one.
There is another point to be made. That WhatsApp group was supposed to be private. In other words the various comments made were the equivalent of chatting with a mate, after work, and letting off a little steam. I think MPs of all parties should be afforded that right – and I don’t think WhatsApp messages should be sequestered and used in evidence against the people who send them, unless they have advocated criminality.
I do not wish to tug at your heartstrings too feverishly, but our MPs have, in the main, miserable lives in which they are constantly subjected to abuse and threats of violence. They have dysfunctional home lives (especially those from the north of the country) and are afforded very few opportunities to display either humour or anger, lest some idiot take offence. They are constrained in what they can say by the whipping system and the party line and of course the knowledge that even the most innocent remark is capable of being regarded as ‘vile’ by someone, and thus meriting a sacking.
They are beset by opponents from across the political divide who will use everything they possibly can against them – and, perhaps worse, even more implacable enemies from their own side. No newspaper was more outraged by Gwynne’s ‘vile’ comments than the Guardian, which noticed that the chief purpose of Trigger Me Timbers was to allow local moderate Labour politicians to take the piss out of the far left, whom the paper (in appalled tones) noted that Gwynne and his friends referred to as ‘trots’.
In short, Gwynne should not be hung out to dry for what he said in private to mates. Je suis Andrew Gwynne.
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