After the passion of the Scottish referendum campaign – with
some of that passion coming rather too close to boiling over at times – there is
a need for a period of calm, of healing, of reconciliation. And one MP south of
the border has rightly looked at what has been going on in that campaign, and
recoiled at some of what she has seen. Sadly, she has not practiced what she
has preached.
That less than totally upstanding Honourable Member is (yes,
it’s her again) Mid Bedfordshire’s
Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who initially told her followers “Truly shocking to read and hear about abuse journalists and campaigners
have received from the Yes campaigners in Scotland ‘off the scale’”. So she
won’t be recycling abuse from the Yes camp, or slagging off Scots, then.
Well, only up to a point: even before her pronouncement, the
fragrant Nadine had sat down to the evening’s TV and declared “Women over 50 removed from TV presenting for
fear of giving offence and yet we are subject to Andrew Neil on Newsnight”.
So Brillo is exempt from her “not being
nasty to Scots” because he once took the piss out of her. Just like tens of thousands of other folks
do.
Rather worse was in store, just four hours after her
observation on the state of the referendum campaign, for Andy McSmith of the Independent: “back on Twitter you inadequate misogynistic bully? I’m delighted to provide
you with an opportunity [to] vent
your woman hating bile”. What did McSmith do to deserve that? He asserted
that she was “an unreliable witness”
(a masterful understatement).
In doing so, he was merely agreeing with her now legendary “70% fiction” claim, but, as the man
said, there was more: “your book is doing
really well Andy, 190,000 on Amazon. Maybe you should achieve something in life
before you criticise others”. And then came the Retweeting of some
particularly nasty abuse from one of the more forthright of the Yes campaign’s
supporters.
Someone called Jason Dolan opined “People who voted no. I hope you die in f***ing agony of cancer. You don’t
deserve to live”. Why would Ms Dorries be watching his Twitter RTs? Why
indeed? But not only was she watching, she Retweeted that one, prompting cancer
survivor Sarah-Jane Phillips to recoil in horror. Citing the book based on her
experiences, she added “I am appalled by
my MP!”
The fragrant Nadine’s excuse – that she was attempting to
shame Dolan – also left Ms Phillips less than impressed: “The comments were vile, why give him an extended audience, I found your
Tweet upsetting”. Thus far there has been no apology from Ms Dorries to her
constituent, and the RT is still there, which, given her
recent supposed concern on Twitter excess, is interesting.
One might think that Nadine Dorries was guilty of double
standards. Which she is.
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