So Farewell Then Louise Mensch

Sometimes one can have too much of a good thing. On occasion, one can equally have too much of a bad thing, and there are few things worse that the weekly dirge of drivel spewed out in the pages of the Sun On Sunday by (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch. But now that drivelfest is at an end, as Ms Mensch has conceded that her column today is to be her last. As Mrs T might have said, Just Rejoice At That News.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

There will no doubt be those who claim they were the ones who got the Mensch column stopped - Iain Dale might be one of them, having suggested the move personally to Sun editor Tony Gallagher - but ultimately the paper cannot keep on offering its readers a weekly page of waffle that makes little sense and is all too often used to pursue personal objectives, on occasion used to bully the powerless.

Worse, the accuracy of Ms Mensch’s outpourings has been shaky at best, one particularly egregious recent example being her claim that there was an “EU Coup” in Portugal, when there was nothing of the sort. And, as she strolls off into yet another reassuringly expensive sunset, I have to tell Ms Mensch that, in her rant over sex attacks in the German city of Köln, she has added a yet more monumental howler to the list.

When she Tweeted “Dear German interior minister, and BBC trying to play down his comments, women won’t stand for this … I want to be clear that this is an act of coordinated sexual violence and racial/religious hatred by a sect”, she had not only got the photo out of context, but had also got the religious affiliation of the perpetrator wrong, too. Wrong enough to be more than embarrassing.

The photo she uses, which she no doubt believes to be a follower of The Prophet spitting, is nothing of the sort. It comes from an article in The New Observer, from January 2014, titled “Communist Thugs Attack Police as Peaceful Austrian Nationalists Gather for Culture-filled Ball”. That would be before the recent waves of refugees arrived in Western Europe from the Middle East and North Africa, then.

But it then gets worse - a lot worse: the photo is from the previous year’s ball, and so even less likely to have anything to do with refugees. And the caption on the photo reads “2013: A Jewish communist (left) spits on a ball attendee” (the political party holding the ball, the FPÖ, is likely to attract hostility from Jews, given its right-wing populist stance). So it appears that Ms Mensch is accusing Jews of “racial/religious hatred”.

How she squares that with her single-handed campaign to call out other Twitter users as anti-Semites, on the basis of very little evidence at all, will be interesting to see. As she has already - inadvertently, perhaps - called Theodore Herzl, a founding father of modern Zionism, for anti-Semitism, she has previous for this kind of gaffe. One has to wonder if the Sun’s management have tired of being associated with such ineptitude.

So, with foot firmly embedded in mouth, there goes Louise Mensch, on her way … out.