Danczuk: Exit stage Right

by Les May

SO the ‘Danczuk Saga’ has finally come to an end. In just two years he has managed to convert a 12,400 majority in 2015 into a total vote of just 883. Clearly people vote for the party not the man because Labour’s Tony Lloyd has a majority of more than 14,000.  What went wrong for Danczuk?

I have been chronicling Danczuk antics on the Northern Voices blog since he published his book about Cyril Smith, ‘Smile for the Camera’, in April 2014.  But the Danczuk story goes back much further than that. In fact I could push it back to 1992 which is when I believe Danczuk found out about Cyril’s spanking of young men at Cambridge House hostel after reading the story published in a copy of the May 1979 edition of the Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) which is archived in Rochdale Reference Library.  It is a reasonable assumption that he would have come across copies of RAP whilst undertaking sociological research about the town.

In November 2006, the Labour magazine Tribune published the results of an investigation into what it called ‘allegations of irregularities, which point to a concerted effort to oust non-Blairites from standing’ which it said ‘raise serious questions over whether the choice of prospective MPs is being conducted in a free and fair manner.’  And who was one of those prospective MPs?  Surprise, surprise, it was none other than Simon Danczuk!

This is what Tribune went on to say about the shenanigans:  The selection for the Rochdale constituency, due end on January 22, has been described by one NEC member as "a debacle".  Before the selection began, a regional officer was accused of assisting Simon Danzcuk by allowing his company Vision 21 to conduct a survey of the attitudes of Rochdale members.  The shortlisting meeting was halted when a vote of no confidence was passed in the selection process.  Several branch nomination meetings had to be re-held after irregularities were discovered.  At the reconvened shortlisting meeting, an all-male shortlist of eight was agreed, despite this being contrary to party rules. All members were issued with a postal ballot, after it was discovered that the original postal votes had been opened prematurely.

(The www link which carried the Tribune article is now dead. If you wish to check it out for yourself I will send you a copy I downloaded earlier this year if you contact an NV editor.)

Then there was the strange story ‘Would-be MP victim of death threats’

which appeared in the Lancashire Telegraph in January 2007.  The would be MP was Simon Danczuk who was of course the source for the story. Caveat emptor!

http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/1116230.wouldbe_mp_victim_of_death_threats/

Or how about the story which appeared on Rochdale Online in May 2008, ‘Danczuk linked to developer threatening legal action against Council!’  The link was via the company Vision 21 set up by Danczuk with Anna McNamara and Ruth Turner, founders of the Big Issue in the North magazine for the homeless.  It is surely just coincidence that the name Ruth Turner figures prominently in the Tribune article and she went on to work in Blair’s office. http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news/8581/danczuk-linked-to-developer-threatening-legal-action-against-council

Now at this point Simon isn’t an MP. But there’s more to come before we get to the election in May 2010.  There’s the little matter of the Spanish Holiday which went wrong.  That’s the first one in 2006 not the second one in 2016 which went even more wrong.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/will-labour-suspend-mr-damczuk.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3157459/Disturbing-questions-Simon-Danczuk-crusades-against-abuse.html

What all these stories amount to is that nothing to do with the public image of Simon Danczuk is straightforward.  The RAP story about Smith from 1979 was about the abuse of power and was based on affidavits by the young men concerned. (I know this is true, I have copies.)  The really interesting question is why the media ignored it back then.

The Danczuk version in the book involves Smith the repeatedly offending sexual predator, the Security Services protecting him, a false story about Northamptonshire police stopping him and finding a boot load of child porn, then letting him free after a ‘phone call to London’, tries to implicate him in the murky happenings at Knowl View special school because he was a Governor, and has a supposed ‘whistleblower’ who saw absolutely nothing and whose story when published in 1995 made no mention of Smith.

What amazes me is that so many people were taken in by this book.  All you have to do to spot the problem is to note the absence of sources in the bibliography then ask Danczuk how many men he interviewed who claim to have been assaulted by Smith.   I have tried on several occasions and he has never replied.  So as an editor of N.V. I drew my own conclusions

Once Danczuk had set his hares running, the police were duty bound to investigate.   If you add up the cost of all the police investigations which resulted from Danczuk’s claims it runs into the millions of pounds.  And when the police found insufficient evidence for the CPS to prosecute, according to Danczuk it was their fault!  But that does not excuse Leicestershire police discussing aspects of the investigation into Greville Janner with Danczuk.  Aspects which later appeared in a national newspaper. (See Appendix).

Since the last day of December 2015, Danczuk has been the political equivalent of ‘dead meat’.  The proximate cause of his undoing was the so called ‘sexting’ incident involving a 17 years old ‘financial dominatrix’.   From then on it was a bad year for him. But as I said earlier nothing is straightforward with Danczuk and his own antics ensured that things went from bad to worse.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/simon-danczuks-snare-of-self-delusion.html

We may not have heard the last of Simon.  I don’t think that a decision has yet been made on whether the overpayment of £11,000 in accommodation expenses for the two of his children constituted fraud.

Now that Rochdale is bidding adieu to Mr D. what sort of reputation will he leave behind?  With the best will in the world I find it difficult to see him as anything other than a man who milked his position as an MP for his own ends and who even in adversity never missed an opportunity to line his own pockets.  All perfectly legally of course.  But that does not take away the smell.

Appendix

25 August 2015

Chief Constable

Leicestershire Police
Force Headquarters
St Johns
Enderby
Leicester.
LE19 2BX

Dear Sir,

I refer to statements made by Simon Danczuk MP in the House of Commons on 23 June 2015 and recorded in Hansard Column 214WH.  I have extracted below the portion of his statement which I believe raises matters of concern about the actions of your force.

Quotation starts:

'I know the police are furious about this, and rightly so.  Anyone who has heard the accusations would be similarly outraged.  I have met Leicestershire police and discussed the allegations in some detail: children being violated, raped and tortured, some in the very building in which we now sit.  The official charges are: 14 indecent assaults on a male under 16 between 1969 and 1988; two indecent assaults between ’84 and ’88; four counts of buggery of a male under 16 between ’72 and ’87; and two counts of buggery between 1977 and 1988.  My office has spoken to a number of the alleged victims and heard their stories.'

Quotation ends.

Taken at its face value this suggests that Leicestershire police discussed with a third party, who though an MP, does not represent a constituency within the Leicestershire police area, matters of a confidential nature relating to a police investigation.  I draw attention to the fact that Mr Danczuk specifically used the word 'discussed' suggesting that information was passed to him by the police service rather than that he was simply questioned about information which he might hold which was relevant to the police investigation.  The detailed information regarding the nature of the charges in the remainder of the statement suggests that this interpretation is correct.

Even if it is considered appropriate to discuss these matters with Mr Danczuk the question arises as to why he was apparently not instructed that these matters were confidential.  Mr Danczuk's choice of words in the first two sentences of the above extract could leave the impression that by not instructing him that the matter was confidential the police service was attempting to use an extra-judicial method to bring pressure to bear upon the Director of Public Prosecutions. I stress that I am not making such an allegation.

The apparent failure to instruct Mr Danczuk that the discussions were confidential extends to an article in the Sun newspaper of 24 June 2015 headed 'Lord Janner "Raped kids in Parliament" claims Labour MP Simon Danczuk', and in which the matters discussed with him by Leicestershire police were repeated. As Mr Danczuk had made his claims under Parliamentary privilege he gave himself, and the Sun, protection against being sued for libel.

On 24 July 2015 Mr Danczuk received a payment of £10,000 from the owners of the Sun for an article he had contributed to.  He declined to say which article the cash related to.

If this payment does relate to the Sun article I believe it raises further questions about the wisdom of discussing material relating to the Janner case with Mr Danczuk without instructing him that the matter was confidential.

I am arranging for a copy of this letter to be sent to the Home Office because I think the concerns raised are applicable to similar discussions between other police forces and MPs who may use parliamentary privilege to make the discussions public.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Les May

The Humbug of Simon Danczuk

Les May

DURING the 2010 General Election campaign Gordon Brown came to Rochdale to support Labour hopeful Simon Danczuk.  He ended up making some unwelcome headlines for himself as a result of the 'bigotgate' incident which seemed to do Labour no harm whatsoever as Danczuk won the seat.
Mr D's comment about this was, ‘He hasn’t apologised to me at any stage. You’d have thought he would. I’d have said sorry if I were him.’   Keep that last sentence in mind!
After the publication of 'his' book, (it seems to have mostly been written by his aide Matt Baker), in April 2014, politics in Rochdale became dominated by one thing: demands by the Danczuk camp followers that the Lib-Dems should 'apologise' for Cyril Smith.  There's that word again.
This was of course a trap. Had they done so it would have been a tacit admission that the claims in the book about Smith's activities after the closure of Cambridge House in the mid 1960s were true and it would have neatly removed the problem of the authors being asked to prove their claims.  If you read the book you soon realise that they amount to little more than gossip, innuendo and assertions by Danczuk and Baker.  
What is beyond doubt, because the allegations were published in Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) in May 1979 when Smith was very much alive, is that at Cambridge House he carried out a number of indecent assaults whilst he was still a member of the Labour Party.  The late Mr Roger Chadwick has placed on record that he gave information about these to the then Labour Agent Josh Hughes. There were of course no demands from Danczuk that his party 'apologise'.
In April of this year Simon was calling for Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders to 'apologise', (there's that word again!), over previous decisions by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute Lord Janner.  Decisions made some ten years ago when she was not in the post.
Two weeks ago Danczuk was on the Daily Politics programme insisting that Ed Milliband has a lot to 'apologise' for, (it's getting monotonous Simon), and would 'probably go down as one of the worst Labour party leaders in history'.
But what happens when the boot is on the other foot and it's Simon Danczuk who is told to apologise?
On pages 221 and 222 of his book is a typical Danczuk story about Smith. In recounting this story he forgot the collateral damage being caused to the reputation of the Northamptonshire Police.
'His car had been pulled over on the motorway and officers had found a box of child porn in his boot.  The police were naturally disgusted and wanted to press charges.  But then a phone call was made from London and he was released without charge.
'Senior officers had threatened the officers involved with dismissal if he was not released immediately. The mood was tense and sullen as officers stood back while Cyril breezily walked past them to freedom. All the staff who knew about it were threatened with the Official Secrets Act if they discussed the matter any further. Once again Cyril walked out of the police station knowing he was a protected man.'
A totally convincing story,  but totally untrue.  How do we know?  Because detectives have interviewed Danczuk, two former chief constables, about 60 police staff, a journalist who has written extensively about Smith, and several members of the public.  No witness has been found who saw Smith in custody or was involved in his arrest, no reports of the alleged incident have been uncovered and no witnesses have been found from Special Branch.  A manual trawl of its archives was undertaken by Special Branch and the Crown Prosecution Service searched its archives for relevant information.  Both found nothing.
So far as I know this is the only one of Danczuk's stories that has been subject to scrutiny. I leave it to your imagination to figure out how much it has cost to find out the truth about it just because he and Baker could not be bothered to check it out before committing it to print.
Speaking on the BBC regional programme 'Look East' the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Northamptonshire Adam Simmonds said the force had been 'maligned' by Mr Danczuk adding, ‘The force should expect an apology.  Northamptonshire Police are not guilty of covering up a crime and indeed letting someone go on to perpetrate more.’So now it's Danczuk's turn to apologise.  Does he?  No, he demands something which is logically impossible, that the police 'disprove' his claim.
But the killer line is what PCC Adam Simmonds said next, ‘Everything in that book's got to be evidence-led and -based, otherwise you are alerting people to the wrong information.’ There's a lot of 'wrong information' in Danczuk's book because overwhelmingly it is not based on evidence.  The false story about improper behaviour by Northamptonshire police with regard to Cyril Smith is just one of the ways in which he tries to conjure up a conspiracy to protect Smith. 
Danczuk is good at demanding other people 'apologise' but when he gets it very wrong he refuses to do it himself.   The man is a Humbug.

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2014/no-1321-september-2014/book-review-smile-camera-double-life-cyril-smit

https://www.politicshome.com/home-affairs/articles/story/dpps-credibility-struggling-over-janner-decision-says-danczuk

http://news.sky.com/video/1470003/simon-danczuk-on-cps-mistakes

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jun/29/dpp-lord-janner-is-a-sign-that-review-system-is-working

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/29/the-guardian-view-on-alison-saunders-dont-sack-her-back-her

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p031y4qc

(Do watch this video and see Tom Baldwin make Danczuk squirm. His ever reddening face is a picture to behold.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-33688479  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-33716982

Will Labour Suspend Mr Danczuk?

by Les May

If the story in the 'Mail on Sunday' about Simon Danczuk's 2008 holiday in Spain with now estranged wife Karen proves anything it is that since his arrival in Rochdale he has created at lot of enemies and some of them have finally caught up with him.


To many people in Rochdale these stories are not new.  They have been circulating as e-mails and as accounts on the World Wide Web for some years.  What is new is that the witnesses to both the fallout from whatever happened between the couple and the attempted 'cover up' by the Labour Party, have been prepared to go on record and make statements to the MoS about what they saw, heard and did.


My experience of putting questions to Mr Danczuk is that he shrugs them off and refuses to answer, and I have not doubt he will do the same with the MoS story. But there are two organisations which cannot afford to ignore it. The first is the Labour Party which will lose all credibility if it tries to treat this story as just another, 'Daily Mail hatchet job on Labour'.


If there is one thing everyone knows about acting leader Harriet Harman, (she of the pink van), it is that she is forever trumpeting Labour's support for 'women's issues'. Well here is her chance to prove it. At the very least Harriet Harman has to suspend Mr Danczuk temporarily until a new investigation into what happened between the couple in Spain and subsequently, which takes into account both the statements made by Karen Danczuk's family to the MoS and the copies of texts sent by Karen to her family. If she feels reluctant to act upon what is after all as yet only an allegation, albeit a well supported one, she need look no further than Mr Danczuk's own record. 


A Huffington Post article of June 22nd this year said 'Labour MP Simon Danczuk has accused his party of failing to act “quickly and efficiently” after he urged Ed Miliband to remove Lord Janner last year after police revealed historic sex abuse allegations'.  As Leicestershire police were unable to confirm that they were investigating Janner with a view to bringing charges this did not happen. But it did not stop Mr Danczuk milking it for publicity.


Ms Harman also has to investigate, and make public, the actions of Anna Hutchinson, the North-West regional director of the Labour Party who contacted Martin Burke, Karen's father, after he made a complaint to the chairman of Rochdale constituency Labour party about the incident in Spain. If Mr Burke's claims are true, and I have no reason to doubt them, then Ms Hutchinson 'blackmailed' Mr Burke into dropping his complaint by threatening that his son Steven would be prosecuted for an offence falling under the Data Protection Act. This looks very much like an attempt at a 'cover up'.


Given that Mr Danczuk has made his name by claiming that the activities of Cyril Smith and others were 'covered up' by people in high places, there is a certain irony that the same sort of accusations are now being levelled at the Labour party. The second organisation is the Greater Manchester Police service.  The MoS article quotes Karen Danczuk's mother Sue as saying, ‘On the phone, she told me he’d attacked her.  Yet the day after she got home, she was going on about how it was lies.' As with Karen's father Martin I can see no reason to doubt these claims and this rapid change of story surely casts some doubt upon Mrs Danczuk's credibility as a witness.


Either Mr Danczuk did 'attack' her and she changed her story after she got home or she massively exaggerated to her family the nature of the 'argument' the couple had had.  Whatever happened it is difficult to explain why a woman with small children found herself at an airport that was closed for the night with little or no money and no tickets to get home.  In February Mrs Danczuk claimed she had been abused in the family home by an 'older family friend'.  By early March the claim had become that it was her older brother Michael who had 'raped her hundreds of times'.  Michael was subsequently arrested and has been bailed twice.  Two women who Michael had known in the past came forward to press further claims against him.  Whether they were prompted to do so by a third party is unknown. At some time in the not too distant future someone at GMP has the unenviable task of deciding whether charges will be brought against Michael against a background of doubt about whether Mrs Danczuk has proved to be an entirely reliable witness with regard to what really happened in Spain in 2008.


In the past I have been critical of what I call the 'Posh Women's Tendency' in the Labour party.  But on this occasion I hope they will show their mettle and press Harriet to suspend Mr Danczuk from the party. After all she showed no such inhibitions in calling for the BBC to sack Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson because she objected to a word he had used.


Les May http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3157459/Disturbing-questions-Simon-Danczuk-crusades-against-abuse
html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/22/simon-danczuk-urged-ed-miliband-to-axe-janner_n_7639938.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/harriet-harman-calls-on-bbc-to-sack-jeremy-clarkson-9319032.html

Oh Lord! Deliver Us From The Danczuks!

Karen and Simon Danczuk are Labour’s most colourful couple. She is a selfie-obsessed former councillor, he is an outspoken MP and scourge of establishment paedophiles. Camilla Long puts them in the frame:

KAREN Danczuk actually nekkid? When I arrive at her bungalow in Rochdale, “the most embarrassing wife in Westminster”, as some people describe her, has just stepped out of the shower. She is flipping her mermaid hair and shimmying across her front room in a towel, slipping into the miniest of minidresses preparing for — well, what? The Sydney Mardi Gras? The swimsuit section of a beauty pageant? Slinking up to racers as a podium girl? Actually, just a cricket match, for which Karen apparently requires neon pink pants and lashings of make-up, applied over the course of our conversation. I’ve never interviewed anyone who spends at least a third of the allocated time staring at themselves in a mirror. But then I’ve never interviewed a couple like Karen and Simon Danczuk before.

Once in a blue moon, politics blesses us with a seriously bonkers couple, a pair so comprehensively and wildly up for the lolz that they cannot resist getting tangled up in a sea of silliness and boobs. The Labour MP for Rochdale and his giggly wife are as flash as they are brash, living life in and out of the tabloids and on Twitter. I’m not sure they’re even politicians — more reality-show contestants with rosettes.

I first became aware of backbencher Simon, for example, when he said that voters thought Ed Miliband was a “f****** knob”, just before the election. Miliband was “aloof” and a hypocrite, he thundered, “more of a toff than David Cameron”. He was the only Labour politician to question Miliband at the time. He said Miliband’s stupid tactics were costing him votes on the doorstep, rightly predicting chaos.

Since he arrived in parliament in 2010, Danczuk has gained a reputation for this kind of outburst: he reported Chris Huhne to the police when he read in the papers that the former Lib Dem cabinet minister had asked someone to take his points on their licence. He exposed one of his predecessors in Rochdale, Cyril Smith, as a violent paedophile. He is currently spearheading a campaign against other high-profile alleged paedophiles, including Lord Janner.

So what is he doing with someone as flirty as Karen? It is one of Westminster’s hottest and most puzzling questions. She is — although my research is not entirely exhausted — the first MP’s wife to openly make a living out of posting pictures of her breasts on the internet, snapping endless suggestive pictures while out campaigning and “volunteering” during the election — bending over, say, a car, while three firemen help her wash it (“thanks for washing my beast”); also drinking champagne naked in the bath and juicing both of them up with suntanning oil by a pool on holiday in Spain.

He is definitely thrilled to be her husband, but can she do something as mature as love?  Surfing Karen’s selfies on Twitter is the least political experience I have ever had — the 32-year-old has recently been selling prints of the signed and “scented” selfies for £10 each on eBay, apparently putting the proceeds towards a white Range Rover.

The 4x4 dwarfs their modest bungalow, a constant hulking reminder that the loidy of the house is “famous for her breast pictures”. Inside, parliament’s Queen of Selfies twirls vacantly and takes pictures with her two sons, Milton, 7, and Maurice, 5 (Simon has another two children with his first wife, Sonia). I have never met a family so chaotic. (During the interview she cries and then Simon cries, both swear and loudly slag other people off and everyone behaves as if this is a perfectly normal Sunday morning.)

Karen was, until recently, a quiet Labour wife, a shy local councillor, who met her future husband as a volunteer at Rochdale Labour Club while he was still married, about 10 years ago. Karen, then a compliance officer, would go to the club after work to hang out. She became Simon’s assistant, eventually rising to councillor, before marrying him. (Sonia divorced Simon in 2010 on grounds of adultery.)

Only last summer she suddenly decided to ditch everything — she won’t be a councillor again. “I’ve got the T-shirt, it’s a ticked box,” she says — in order to concentrate full time on her boobs, or “ding-dongs” as she calls them, hiring a shiny London PR to cook up an endless supply of tabloid stories and help her attract 50,000 followers on Twitter.

She now takes selfies constantly. Does she feel the pictures don’t actually exist if she doesn’t show her honkers? She claims “there’s not that many [pictures] that show boobs”, but after a forensic search I can confirm they amount to at least three-quarters of her postings. And what does Simon, 48, make of her pictures? “I do get asked,” he says, snugly sipping a brew on the sofa in the sitting room, as Karen crosses and uncrosses her knickers like a contestant on Blind Date, “what attracted me to the 36DD Karen Danczuk?” (Sometimes when he tells this story, the figure is as high as a bra-churning 34E.) He gives a roar of laughter. She gives a roar of laughter. “My personality!” she squeaks.

Grin up north: Simon and Karen discover the “portrait” — it’s a bit like a selfie, but no iPhone (Steve Morgan)Do they ever have time for politics, I wonder? Simon spends much of his time defending Karen on Twitter, attacked by “feminists!” and “Labour people!” telling him to tell her to “rein it in”. He has endless “rude remarks. You know, ‘he’s punching above his weight’.”

“This perception that Simon’s got loads and loads of money and he’s my sugar daddy,” gobbles Karen. “Well actually, we didn’t back then. We lived in a two-up, two-down terrace on an estate.”

“We’re a team,” nods Simon.

But it is true that Simon’s otherwise successful career as an MP is in danger of being drowned by a tide of sportswear and nipples. He even suffered his own porn shame when his phone — he claims accidentally — started favouriting explicit material on Twitter a few months ago (he blamed a faulty phone charger). He may have spent the past four years unearthing the true horrors inflicted on “dozens upon dozens” of children by his predecessor in Rochdale, Cyril Smith, but in the face of Karen’s high spirits he, too, seems to have gone a bit Joey Essex. Even today he struggles to maintain a line of rational argument over Karen, who takes five, six, seven selfies. (I’m afraid two are with me.)

He knew Labour was heading for trouble, he explains, when he’d been out knocking on doors during the election, so he wasn’t “completely shocked by the result”. What shocks him now are the problems facing the party, terrible months of bloodletting in which everyone will blame the unions, or as Karen howls, “the London elite”. It is inevitable that the party “has to change a heck of a lot”, he says. “People need to accept we got it wholly and completely wrong.”

At one point he was intending to stand for deputy leader, but couldn’t get the votes (“Too early”, he says). He is now backing Liz Kendall for leader, a politician who, like him, is to the right of the party and interested in business, rather than the “wishy-washy” leftism that has not worked, says Karen. “You’ve got to appeal to everyone, haven’t you?”

Neither of them is afraid to admit they like making and spending money. People should listen to businessmen “because they’re successful,” shrugs Simon. “It’s not like the mill owners saying you’ve got to vote in a certain way.” No one should listen to someone like Russell Brand — a “disgrace” and a “pillock”, says Simon — who performed a misguided interview with Miliband. “And then they roll out that bloody whatsisname… who was it?” He means Eddie Izzard. “I don’t really know who Eddie Izzard is,” says Karen.

No one in Rochdale does. Looking around, the Danczuks’ house could not be less glitzy, with its pen on the walls, flimsy doors and plywood fittings, barely any possessions apart from a huge bank of DVDs and political books like Brown at 10 and other self-help manuals. Karen, who grew up six miles away in Middleton, comes from a family so poor her mother has never left England. “Never been on an aeroplane,” she says. “Never worked in her life. Just had loads of kids.” Her sister “has never been to Spain. She’s never gone to a restaurant on her own. She went to a pub not long ago, like Christmas Day. But she can’t order food. She doesn’t have the social skills.”

Even Karen struggles: she had only been to London “three times” before Simon became an MP. She recently ate in a pub on her own, and it “didn’t faze me”. “You’ve grown in confidence,” nods Simon. I am quite shocked, and touched, when she tells me that before she gave birth to her sons, she had no idea she needed to go to the doctor or about pre-natal classes. She just turned up at the hospital like a dairy cow waiting to be milked.

Simon himself grew up with “quite literally holes in my shoes”, leaving school at 16 with no qualifications. His English father was adopted by Ukrainians after the war. Apparently there are lots of Ukrainians in Burnley and Rochdale; the name is pronounced Dan-shook. Simon followed the classic factory-night school-government officer trajectory of the Labour MP. He began as a worker making gas fires, before studying for a degree from Lancaster University, then becoming a public-affairs consultant and then an MP.

He got further “brownie points” a year or so after his election, after he made a speech in parliament following the grooming scandal in Rochdale. Everyone told him to shut up about the sex-trafficking operation, which, in 2012, saw nine Asian men convicted of offences against at least 47 white girls. “Many said, don’t mention ethnicity,” he says. Even his neighbouring MP, Jim Dobbin, now deceased, told him: “Don’t talk about race. You know, we don’t do it like that.”

But Danczuk ignored him. He made a speech about Rochdale and felt he had to mention Cyril Smith. “And that kicked everything off.”  The Liberals around Rochdale were furious. “ ‘You mentioning Smith, how dare you?  You’re a disgrace.’ Blah, blah, blah. But then many more victims and police officers came forward.”  By 2014, Danczuk had enough material to publish a well-received book revealing the extent of Smith’s terrible crimes.  The cover-up, he later said, “reached from Rochdale all the way to the very top of the establishment”.

Indeed: a few months after the book came out, three senior police officers from Leicestershire police asked to come and see him.  The policemen wanted to know if Smith had ever been connected to Lord Janner, a former Labour politician also accused of terrible crimes in children’s homes and more. They wanted to know the “political fallout” of arresting someone like Janner.  During the meeting they told him about the allegations against the peer, “which were, you know…”  His eyes fill with tears. “I get upset about this stuff.” “Do you want a hanky?” says Karen.

Simon goes outside with the hanky. When he comes back, he says the allegations against Janner are “much worse” than Smith.  He claims that both Janner and Smith came as a bit of a surprise — he had never really been interested in child abuse, but somehow he arrived in Rochdale, “and then, out of all the families I could have married into,” laughs Simon.

Because the most dreadful part of the entire Danczuk saga is Karen’s claim that she is a victim of abuse herself.  Last February, she said she was raped and sexually abused “hundreds of times” by someone close to her family as a child.  A few weeks later, her brother was arrested for abusing her between the ages of six and 11 (he is five years older).

Her mother has dismissed the allegations as “bullshit”, saying that Karen is an “attention-seeker” and a fantasist. Her brother said he felt like he was in some kind of X-Factor soap opera in which Karen is using the abuse allegations for column inches. Karen claims that, as a professional sex object, “mixing yourself up with child abuse is not naturally what you’d do to make yourself famous”.

She nevertheless also says that taking selfies is her way of medicating the pain: “I can’t remember which newspaper it was,” she says, “[but] I said I do selfies to cope with my past life.”  Her mother, she adds, is bitter and jealous.  “I am the only one of the five of [her children] who has succeeded in life.”

As a little girl she was “ugly and skinny with massive teeth”.  “Scary,” nods Simon.  “So if someone says, ‘Karen, don’t do selfies,’ ” she adds, “I rebel. I’m going to do it twice as much. That little kid who wouldn’t say boo to a goose — she’s captured Twitter by storm. I just think it’s overwhelming. Like, woo! So that other night we were in the Great Hall [for the election], it was like, oh my God, you deserved to win…”  She’s crying now. “I’m filling up… When I tweet something I get all these replies, like ‘Oh my gosh, Karen, you’re absolutely gorgeous.’ ”

I don’t know what to make of it all: the troubled family background or the survival via tweeting, the endless jiggly stories of how Tristram Hunt begged for a photo or how she once got in a lift with Miliband, pressed her boobs on him and poor Ed “didn’t know where to look”.  Simon worries about not using Twitter enough, not using it right; Karen is simply unable to stop talking about it or indeed anything, including Simon’s ex-wife, Sonia, bringing the total number of people in their immediate family that Karen and Simon aren’t speaking to up to nearly everyone (including, sadly, Simon’s other children).

Sonia, snaps Karen, “is an irrelevance. That’s why we don’t speak about her. Obviously you need to report he’s married, but I mean I would ask…”
She sighs. “But we had the drugs thing not that long ago that came out of nowhere.” 
What drugs thing?  Suddenly I realise: their tabloid reality is moving way faster than mine.  The last time I had this, I was interviewing Katie Price, who had recently been dumped by someone and was determined to leak the name of her new target.  I sat in her white Range Rover, desperately guessing, like the audience on Jeremy Kyle.  But there is no such fan dance with Karen.  She comes straight out with the truth.

“She told this story, yeah,” she rasps, “that Simon used to take drugs.”

“I did take drugs,” interjects Simon. Cripes. “Ecstasy once or twice. And that’s what’s in the piece.” I look it up:  “Boob Pics MP: I took Ecstasy”.  Simon would smoke dope and go out clubbing with his wife in Manchester.

“Yeah,” says Karen. “In your twenties. But you’re approaching 50 now, and as David Cameron says, who hasn’t done it?”

I’m not sure this is what David Cameron does say, but who cares when there are photoshoots and appearances on Loose Women to be done?  Karen has a fervent tabloid imagination:  “Like, right now we’re sat here,” she breathes, “and this is how I always think: some poor kid is being raped.” Nothing is too grim, too awful, too terrible, too thrillingly dingy. It is the Monty Python northerners sketch, but with tits.

What next for the Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe of Rochdale?  Simon says politics inevitably puts “a strain” on wives “or husbands”.  He is determined to continue his work as a paedophile hunter.  Karen has not entirely abandoned politics, or at least, is currently an outside bet to become the Boris of the north in Manchester’s mayoral elections in November.

As I leave, I take a selfie with her in the mirror.  She is curiously timid when the camera snaps on, delicate and peering.  I look at her little eyes, like a sexy woodland vole’s.  What does she think when she looks in the mirror?  “I don’t know.”

She turns to Simon. “I don’t think anything, do I?”

As reported in the SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE.