Spanker Danczuk Is Back

Adding to the list of upcoming by-elections, and making a change from all those formerly safe Tory seats that The Blue Team is about to lose badly, former veteran MP Tony Lloyd sadly passed away recently, creating a vacancy in the Greater Manchester seat of Rochdale. It is an odds on Labour hold: the rest, apart perhaps from the Lib Dems, might as well not turn up.

The Rest includes Reform UK, what used to be known as the Brexit Party, but is no longer led by former Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage. So what would a sensible Reform UK choice have been? What would a rational party have done? What would Nietzsche have done? Sadly, this is not a party where sensible and rational are on the menu. Hence their candidate choice.

Answering the question “who would be the least suitable candidate for a by-election in Rochdale for any party” in one, back from the political dead zone has come Simon Danczuk, who has lurched sufficiently to the right since Labour decided they could get along fine without him to support the Tories’ policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. But here a problem enters.

Spanker has recently become married (for the third time) to Claudine Uwamahoro, a Rwandan beauty therapist whom he met on a business trip to, er, Rwanda. He is 57. She is 28. So he’s all for deporting people to Rwanda, while his third wife moves the other way. The Mirror had more.

She arrived in the UK last August and “now splits her time between his homes in Pimlico, central London, and Rochdale, Lancs, where he was MP”. Wonder how he paid for a place in Pimlico. Whatever. While his remarrying is not a problem for his candidacy, Danczuk’s past conduct will enable any of his opponents who want to make something of it to have a field day.

There is, for starters, that most unfortunate incident in the Flying Horse pub, where Spanker is alleged to have lived up to his nickname while in what appears to have been an excessively overtired state. Fortunately for him, his pals got him out of the pub before he got thrown out, and the licensee declined to comment on the matter, far less make a complaint.

More troubling was a recent headline in the Murdoch Sun: “Shamed MP Simon Danczuk is standing as Reform candidate after remarrying in wake of split from Karen Danczuk”. Ah, remember “selfie queen” Kazza D? Might she decide to rock up for a little free publicity? And what was that “Shamed” all about? Ah well. “He was suspended from the party and blocked from standing in 2017 after being caught sending explicit messages to a 17 year-old girl”.

Ah yes. That kind of “Shamed”. But do go on. “He apologised for the texting scandal, admitting it was inappropriate and stupid and declaring: ‘There is no fool like an old fool’”. But that was only scratching the surface. The charge sheet is a long one. Like his hypocrisy over MP’s expenses, and subsequent paying back of a five-figure sum he had over-claimed, are well known.

There is more. A lot more: the abandonment of constituents when Rochdale was inundated with flood water, drunken threats against a neighbouring Labour MP, arrest and temporary imprisonment by the Guardia Civil at Orihuela following yet another heated bust-up with ex-wife Karen, the splashing of another grubby and opportunistic fling with a much younger woman over the front page of the Murdoch Sun. Ah yes, I remember it well.

Spanker and his co-writer Matt Baker brought us Smile For The Camera, from where the myth came that they were the ones who first told the world about former Rochdale MP Cyril Smith’s behaviour. But that had happened back in 1979 when Rochdale Alternative Press had published a number of allegations, these then being brought to a wider audience by Private Eye.

On top of all that were allegations of dirty tricks against his then political opponents. When the Sun tells “The Rochdale byelection is expected to be one of the most toxic races for Parliament ever”, what they don’t say is that Danczuk may have brought some of that toxicity with him.

First Reform UK MP? He’s got no chance. Another lost deposit beckons.

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