Simon Danczuk’s Double Disloyalty

Once again, the Mail On Sunday has run an article in the name of Rochdale’s nominally Labour MP Simon Danczuk in which the Labour Party is ritually trashed, before readers are informed that Danczuk is only a humble moderate who wants his party to win, although only on terms that are amenable to Himself Personally Now. But the attack on his own party’s leadership is not Danczuk’s only act of disloyalty today.

Under the headline “Watch out, Citizen Corbyn...moderates are on march”, the latest Danczuk diatribe tells “Week after week, as one chaotic incident after another unfolds, I have to look at my calendar to check it's not 1983”. When you were not yet old enough to vote, then, Si? But do go on. “Robert Lindsay, the actor who played Wolfie Smith, wants Citizen Smith back on the telly”. Oh dear.

Whoever is doing the research is not having a good day: Citizen Smith, an early John Sullivan vehicle, was broadcast from 1977 to 1980. Have another go. “as the hard Left holy grail disintegrates, it's worth reflecting on how we got here. One of the main reasons the hard Left has never had much appeal to the great British public is because it can't hide its inherent viciousness”. Like that smear of Colin Lambert, then?

You know, Si, the one that was exposed after Zelo Street published a redacted copy of an email apparently sent from your former sidekick Matt Baker, intended to be leaked to the local media in Rochdale to help the smear campaign against Lambert and others because they wouldn’t do your bidding? The email on which Lambert has consulted his lawyers and may well take action against you to clear his name?

Simon Danczuk is in no position to hand out lessons on “inherent viciousness”. But he is painting himself as some kind of moderate conscience of the party: “The moderates, on the other hand, are now on the march. Instead of watching Labour sail off to never-never land, some of us have decided to drop an anchor of common sense realism and turn this ship around”. If only the “ship” was going where he pretends it is. Which it isn’t.

But he’s still ready to play the victimhood card: “The hard Left wants a bloody battle of deselections and expulsions”. Quite apart from the unnecessary borrowing from the playbook of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse), the only person who will be to blame if Danczuk gets the boot will be him. And what won’t help his cause is that the suspicion is growing that he is not writing these articles.

The style of the latest Danczuk MoS piece suggests that Baker is still working for him. And Matt Baker is now officially spinning for Bristol’s independent Mayor George Ferguson, who is running for re-election against a Labour Party candidate. If Baker is indeed still ghosting for Danczuk, that introduces a double lack of loyalty. Yet on he blathers, claiming that it’s his party, and he has served it all these years.

If only he had served the party instead of himself, he might have a point. But he hasn’t, and so he doesn’t.