Simon Danczuk Is A Terrible Spinner

There are times when you have to do a double take to confirm that Simon Danczuk really is a Labour MP, such is his propensity to engage in press campaigns to slag off the party. Another of these - which I do hope Danczuk will remember to notify promptly, if, as I expect, he was paid for it - has been an article for the Murdoch Sun in which he castigates Mil The Younger for doing something that Danczuk has had to invent first.

Behold the representatives of Themselves Personally Now

The headline, “SIMON DANCZUK: ED MILIBAND WAS A TERRIBLE LEADER … Rochdale MP says the party can't move forward if the former leader is hanging around like an awkward relative at a funeral”, tells you all you need to know about the level of invention being applied. The General Election was last month, yet Danczuk is able to conclude that Miliband is “hanging around”.

“There’s an art to dealing with failure. Losing graciously is a true measure of someone’s character. ‘It’s time to get off the stage,’ famously said John Major after the Tories’ humiliating election defeat in 1997, before heading off to watch cricket … Other politicians have shown dignity in defeat over the years. Gordon Brown removed himself from front-line politics immediately after Labour lost in 2010”, he tells.

But, as Captain Blackadder might have observed, there was only one thing wrong with this idea - it was bollocks. Both Major and Brown remained MPs for the whole of the Parliament following their defeats. They both, therefore, in Danczuk’s words, “hung around”. Indeed, Brown made a few notable speeches in the Commons, one as recently as this year. But on he ploughs regardless.

Readers are told “not every political leader understands defeat. And in Ed Miliband’s case, Labour’s most humiliating defeat in a generation barely seems to have registered … Instead of adopting a dignified period of silence, he popped up on the backbenches this week, showing no repentance or regret … his people have already started briefing he should be given a high profile shadow cabinet position”.

This is utter horseshit. Nobody is suggesting Miliband be given a shadow cabinet position. Danczuk’s logic doesn’t stand up, either: first he is saying “There are some Labour MPs arguing we need to finish what Ed Miliband started and build on his legacy. This is madness”, but then he hedges with “Don’t get me wrong, there are some good ideas that do need to be salvaged from the wreckage of the election”.

But this drivel is hardly unexpected from an MP who represents part of the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale, a town with a great liberal tradition, and enjoys his London-centric friends and habits, then slags off others as being, er, metropolitan liberals who live in a London-centric world. It’s a strange kind of party loyalty that has a Labour MP cashing in on his relationship with the Murdoch press so he can put the boot in on the leadership.

Fortunately, clowns like Danczuk will never be taken seriously. Not even by the Sun.