by Les May
THE unfolding saga of the response of Simon Danczuk to the
stories about him 'sexting' a 17 year old young woman who it turns out had a
nice sideline in toe nail clipping, used undergarments and 'pay to be
humiliated', has been entirely predictable.
First there's the contrition as he tweets, 'My behaviour
was inappropriate & I apologise unreservedly to everyone I've let down. I
was stupid & there's no fool like an old fool.' A visit to church with ex-wife Karen the very
next Sunday drove home the message.
But by Monday the backtracking had started. The three dozen or so of us who gathered
outside his office to show we were very unhappy about yet another example of
behaviour which shows a complete lack of integrity, were 'malcontents'. In an interview with LBC he was playing down
the role of excessive alcohol in his problems though a day earlier the Mail on
Sunday had carried a story that he would often sink three bottles of wine a
night and had said 'he was sometimes too drunk to remember sending explicit
messages to Sophena Houlihan'.
Offered a lifeline by the interviewer who asked whether the
'sexting' was a set-up he grabbed it with both hands and said he wasn't ruling
it out. Blaming Corbyn supporters might
have given him a shred of credibility in the eyes of some people. Foolishly he was not content with this and
thought he'd go one better by suggesting that 'The Establishment' were very
unhappy with his claims of sexual abuse being 'covered up'.
Ludicrous though this is, it is par for the course for
someone who wove much of his book around the idea that the security services had
protected Cyril Smith. For Danczuk to imply they were out to get him was a step
too far and made it look as if he was clutching at straws to salvage his
reputation.
Then he played the 'working class' card. No one was questioning 'posh' Boris Johnson's
payments for journalistic work or his extra-mural activities, but Simon had it
that he was being pilloried because he was 'working class'.
Now I suppose that having spent the first eleven years of my
life with three siblings, a road-sweeper dad and an illiterate (but much loved)
mam, in a 'two up, two down' terraced house, which had no bathroom, gas
lighting, a black-leaded range, an outside lavatory and a 'slop stone' instead
of sink, I could just about pass muster as being 'working class', but Mr Danczuk
might think I'm biased. If you really
want to hear what someone who certainly has 'no airs and graces' thinks about
Mr Danczuk behaviour listen to this:
What all this points to is that Mr Danczuk just 'doesn't get
it'. He still cannot see what he has done wrong and expects it to be business
as usual. Why else would he spend a
couple of hours exchanging texts with the young woman who has featured at the
centre of his most recent difficulties and suggesting they should be
photographed together for which she would receive a fee?
Anyone who really understood what he had done wrong would know
that trying to get her to meet for coffee so that they could be photographed
together because it would 'help him' and using as inducement the lure of media
fees, which are precisely what some people object to him receiving, was only
going to make his present predicament worse. Such poor judgement does leave one
wondering if he is fit to be an MP.
For me the long term problem with Mr Danczuk's behaviour is
that I see much of it as 'money grubbing'; exploiting his position as an MP to
line his pockets, and I object to his cavalier attitude to the truth in his
book about Cyril Smith, parts of which we now know to be untrue. What I did not
anticipate was how some people would react to the fact that the young woman in
question was 17.
When he tweeted about South Street Nursery, aside from the
fact that it looks opportunistic, I don't think he can have expected that some
people would react in the way they did. But given Mr Danczuk's history as an MP
of pointing the finger at others, does he really have any grounds for complaint?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12088540/Simon-Danczuk-invited-sex-text-teenager-for-a-coffee-despite-calls-for-him-to-step-down-over-messages.html
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment