Like Heinz there are all varieties of MPs. Bores (good morning Bill). Sycophantic arse licking nonentities who will sell their granny for a red box (keep trying Messrs Mak and Ellis, one day…..). Good guys ( ah, Mr. Halfon). And insufferable partisan shits. Well, there are a quite a few of those. But I want to welcome a newcomer to that pantheon of shittery. Arise Mr Neil Coyle. Yes, I know, I had to look him up too. It appears that he is the new Labour MP for Southwark. Young Coyle wants to to make a name for himself with the whips. So yesterday he crawled briefly out of the sewer to report John Whittingdale to some Parliamentary watch dog for failing to declare that he took his then partner (the whippy one) on a trip which cost his hosts £534. Good God the wickedness of it. Drum him out. Make him resign. Humiliate him some more. And no doubt Coyle is very pleased with himself. He probably got a paragraph in his local paper. But when he slips into the tea room he would have confirmed his colleagues secret suspicion that he is a bit of a tosser.
Coyle has broken a sacred convention. Don’t attack the good guys of whatever party particularly when they are down on their luck. And Whitto is one of the good guys. He is straightforward, honest, has a great sense of humour and is very clubbable. He also a rather good minister.
When I first heard about the dopey Byline story I asked a number of my old hard, bitten, cynical, journo friends if there was anything in the conspiracy theory. To a man and woman they came to the conclusion that they didn’t give a damn about what Whitto was up to in the bedroom and that the theory that Leveson would be watered down in return for the press burying the slap and tickle story was just the work an over active imagination, sloppy journalism and the eye watering hypocrisy of those precious, pious creeps at Hacked Off. They were right.
And talking about eye watering hypocrisy it’s time to revisit the latest antics of Bozo. He really is becoming as cynical and opportunistic as Trump. It is as if they are morphing into some bottle blond political blancmange.The latest ruse is to promise more money for the health service with the money we will get back from Brussels if we do a runner. Well, it’s not going to be an awful lot. We pay out net £10.6 billion a year which in the grand scheme of things is fairly small. If we were OUT, £3.6 billion would have to be paid to the farmers in agriculture support, grants to hospitals, universities and regional funds would have to be maintained and we haven’t even started thinking about how much we would have to pay for the privilege of remaining in the Single Market. But it is not the economic illiteracy which borders on the laughable, what I find so sickening is the hypocrisy of jumping on board the NHS bandwagon when so many the Brextards are its sworn enemies. That scary little man called Hannan tops the list and Mathew Elliot has even set out a menu of charges. £20 to see the GP, and a daily rate for hospital stays of £20. And as popular with Joe Public as a cup of cold sick.
But Bozo himself is not without form for being an enemy of a free health service. “If NHS services continue to be free in this way they will continue to be abused like any free service”. And, “if people have to pay for them they will value them more”. The problem is that he writes or says anything that he thinks will attract attention and transient popularity. Then some aide points out that it was toxic, untrue, dangerous or barking mad and there is the squeal of breaks and the smell of burning rubber as another U turn is performed. It is then usually followed by a denial, a misunderstanding, a quote out of context or the bias of whatever news outlet caught him out on his latest whopper.
But yesterday something pivotal happened. He was making a speech whereby he claimed that Cameron and chums were the Rattners of the REMAIN argument, in other words crap. Pretty explosive stuff. This sort of comment, if made by a REMAINER would have led to howls of outrage. But it was what happened next that sent a sinister chill down my spine. Bozo spotted the splendid Michael Crick doing a live piece to camera in the hall. Crick is despised by politicians with something to hide because he is so tenacious. The reaction was almost Trumpian. “Shut up. Can someone interrupt Crick at the back there”. And some goon did. At last the mask of jovial bonhomie momentarily slipped and we saw Boris the bully and media basher in Panzer mode. It was as revealing as it was Gothic. I wonder if this is the moment that the media finally falls out of love with him.
