The location is a restaurant in inner London. It’s the mid-80s and a prominent Labour frontbencher is sitting having a meal with a friend when he is recognised by a couple of teenagers. The teenagers throw some insults in his direction, riling him. As they go to leave, sniggering, they smack him over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Laughing their heads off, they scamper.
The red-mist descends over this shadow minister. He leaps up, chases the kids and grabs them outside. Up against the restaurant window, he gives them a bloody good kicking.
The MP chuckled as he re-told me this story. The thing was, someone had spotted him do it and tipped off a journalist at the Daily Mirror. The story, however, never made it to the press. A deal had been done — keep this under wraps and we’ll reward you with a big scoop down the line — that sort of thing. Politics, deals, yada yada.
Flabbergasted, I thought to myself about how lucky that this politician is that he wasn’t around today? If he had done that today, 5 people would have captured it on their phones and uploaded to Twitter. His political career and life’s work would’ve been over before he had finished his dessert!
I am not really a fighter. Outside of handbags on the footie field, I haven’t been involved in a scrap since school. But if a stranger hurled insults at me and smacked me over the head with a newspaper, I might momentarily lose my head.
So, I am going to defend this MP. Was what he did right? No. Was it an understandable human mistake, a fleeting lapse of judgement? Yes.
This little story came back into my head today after the Chair of the Young Conservative Network, Daniel Grainger, got himself in trouble for calling Birmingham a dump. Presumably, he tweeted it after he got off the train at New Street on his way to the Conservative Party Conference. He’s now apologised for ‘any offence caused’ and said he tweeted in anger after he was threatened ‘with a mugging’.
I, along with 99.9% of people, don’t care what this rando thinks of Birmingham. But political-partisans will see his tweet as an opportunity to condemn an opponent and use his tweet to fuel the idea that being Tory equals being a snob. His tweet blew-up so much that the Conservative West Midlands Mayor felt it necessary to publicly smack the lad down.
But here is my take on this mini-storm. Show me someone who hasn’t expressed a thought that a neighbourhood, town or city in England is a dump and I’ll show you a liar.
In a previous era, this lad would’ve just told his mates what he thought of Birmingham. Now, he tweets it.
Perfectly human and incredibly mild bad behaviour will always certainly offend someone, somewhere, and political-partisans will jump on those misdeeds. If you’re unfortunate enough, people will trawl through all your public utterances to find any other time you’ve said something uncouth to keep the pitchforks sharpened… and we’ll accept that this is a perfectly normal thing for people to do to someone over a minor slight.
When sharing his apology, Mr Grainger said that he had ‘always enjoyed his visits’ to Birmingham. This comment sounded like the sort of transparent vapid nonsense politicians often say and after it was discovered that Mr Grainger has a history of Brum-hate... We can pretty comprehensively say that it was transparent vapid nonsense.
Pretty funny, but also pretty jarring. Jarring because he shouldn’t have to come out and say ‘I’ve always enjoyed my visits to Birmingham’. No, it’s fine to find a city or town, dull, uninspiring, dirty, crowded, ugly, unwelcoming, badly managed etc. Yes, calling it ‘a dump’ is a bit rude but come on now.
It’s completely unreasonable to expect any person, a politician or otherwise, to never utter a bad word about any place. Why do we expect our politicians to say inane nonsense such as I’ve “always enjoyed my visits to… insert name of every place they’ve ever visited” when we know deep down its all an act?
Because of social media, it is much harder for people to hide their personality, their flaws, their past, and their true opinions. Those in the public eye live with a never ending searchlight over their heads, ready to reveal their hotheadedness, potty mouthes, crass jokes, their snobbery and their dismissiveness, foibles and idiosyncrasies. They can never take a wrong step.
The Labour backbencher who got into that fight and beat up those teenagers would go on to be an extremely successful politician and one who is greatly admired in the Labour Party. They had bucketloads of personality and seemingly, had a temper on them.
Many of history’s greatest political figures have also been flawed individuals. However, their personal flaws were often hidden. Nowadays we are forever watched and recorded. If, as a society, we cannot learn to accept that people make mistakes (or that people might hate your home town), we will be left with a parliament of lesser standing.
The only people who will make it to the top will be those who can hide their personality from view, be utterly inoffensive and beige, and can say ‘I’ve always enjoyed my visits to Croydon’ with a straight face.
If, like me, you don’t think this will be a good thing and think it will lead to a strange micro-pool of talent ever reaching frontline politics, what shall we do? I think we should start by generally, being less precious or less partisan. Fundamentally we should, as a point of principle, not give people flack for stuff we’d do ourselves! And finally, we should accept that most good people can make very human, momentary lapses of judgement* and we should be aware that most of us have the capacity to make similar mistakes. Before we condemn, let’s think about how we would be treated if the shoe was on the other foot.
*Of course we should draw the line somewhere regarding serious foul play, bigoted behaviour or otherwise very concerning patterns of behaviour. That should go without saying.
