Saturday 9 January 2016

The Predictablity of Simon Danczuk


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?

 


 


 




 


 

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