Why not let politicians call each other ‘scum-sucking pigs’?

David Wright, the Labour MP for Telford, should get out more, he should be more inclusive. I have attended many Conservative party conferences and mingled late at night with the delegates, and I have to say it always seemed to me that the party was composed almost exclusively of scum-sucking pigs. Sometimes I would go to these conferences with the notion, maybe at the back of my mind, that perhaps next time an election came around I might vote Conservative, given the state of the country and the Iraq war and Harriet Harman and what have you. But the scum-sucking pig stuff cured me of that within four days.

But then attending a conference for a few days is not really good enough. It is like visiting Marrakech on a weekend mini-break, as I did recently, and concluding that all Arabs are sexually repressed criminals — which is fine colloquially, the sort of casual observation you might share with friends over a glass of wine but which might not, if we’re honest, stand up to the closest of scrutinies. An ill-conceived generalisation, in other words. What about Edward Said, for example? Or Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze chief who kept us all entertained a couple of decades back with his intransigence and sense of principle? Or Anwar Sadat? You see there are literally tens of Arabs I could name right now who disprove that cheap and rather insulting derogation.

Likewise with the Conservative party. They are not all public-school-educated money-grubbing snobs and bores. There are several grammar-school-educated money-grubbing snobs and bores too. And there are nice people as well. I know of six Conservative party members whom I am proud to call friends and they include, for example, the former editor of this magazine, the soi disant dissident David Davies, the rather lovely Julie Kirkbride, the charming and decent Patrick Mercer MP… hell, one could go on and on.