Across the pond

It’s only about forty years ago since Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’ But there was Conservative MP, Julie Kirkbride, telling us all at our breakfast tables, via the national media, that she had done nothing wrong, and was determined to fight on. Despite the brick thrown through the window of her constituency office and and petition there asking her to go, which has, reportedly, now got 6,000 signatures.

But by the time I started to prepare my lunch, BBC Radio Four was leading on the story that she had decided to throw in the towel.

Here’s a summary of Kirkbride’s crimes, in Daily Mail speak:

It emerged this morning that she paid the local Tory chairman’s wife to be her secretary and also employed the couple’s daughter as a full-time nanny.

Earlier today, she had admitted using taxpayers’ money to help fund a £50,000 extension to her second home.

She is the seventh Tory to step down and follows her husband, fellow MP Andrew MacKay, who resigned last week after he was branded a ‘thieving toad’.

This, of course, came on top of the headlines that she had paid her brother to look after her son and live rent free in her second home.

Lower down in the story there is classic Daily Mail killer paragraph:

Miss Kirkbride employed sister Karen Leadley as a £12,000-a-year secretary, even though she works from her home 140 miles from Miss Kirkbride’s constituency office.

The Daily Mail coverage, and in this it not much worse than any of the other newspapers, mixes up serious abuse of the MP’s expenses’ rules with what is common practice and desirable practice.

There is nothing corrupt or wrong with MP’s employing their own wives, brothers and sisters, and relatives of loyal constituency workers, like the local constituency chairman. And there is nothing wrong in employing a sister as secretary, even if she lives 140 miles away, in these days of the internet when the help lines are manned by people living in India, paid less than the minimum wage. And secretaries these days can access and answer all their bosses emails even if they live in the Great Australian Desert.

Before I go on, I must make it plain that I think both members of this husband and wife team, who were very close to the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, deserve to be thrown out.

Kirkbride’s worse fault, in my view, was NOT keeping in touch with her constituents over the last two weeks. Which, after all was the main purpose of the system which allowed MPs to claim expenses so they could have a second home to do just that. Even in the current highly charged atmosphere those interviewed in the street included several who thought she had been a good constituency MP. She made a serious tactical error in not going back to talk to her party workers, and people on the streets, to explain herself to them, the people who voted for her to represent them.

That’s why I am in favour of an autumn general election, rather than a June or July election. Because, as all party leaders, as well as the rest of us, now are saying, we need to address necessary reform in our constitution which goes far beyond MP’s expenses.

The key thing is are whether they are doing the work

Drippygate is trial by media, even though the facts it reveals are those which come from Parliamentary records.

According to the Daily Mail, Kirkbride’s husband, Andrew Mackay, has been ‘branded as theiving toad’. Not by a court of law. But by who?

I checked. Mackay was first called a ‘thieving toad’ by a heckler when he faced his constituents after the expenses scandal broke. This was reported in a long article in The Independent that day.

Since then the only references to ‘thieving toad’ have been in the Daily Mail. So Mackay has been branded as a ‘thieving toad’ by none other than the newspaper of middle England, owned by the same family that got journalism should a bad name in the 1930s.

Power without responsibility.

Drippygate, which has got rid of more British MPs in two weeks than any other newspaper expose has done in a lifetime, is fuelled in part by Daily Mail style journalism. Too much hatchet stuff. Too much heat. Not enough enlightenment.

For this I must share some of the blame, because I encouraged Will Lewis, when he was my student, to do his first placement, and take his first job, on the Mail on Sunday. But I also made it plain to him that what passed for serious journalism in the Mail would not get him his Diploma in Periodical Journalism at City U.

He was not a bad student. And Will Lewis’s Telegraph is not branding Mackay as a ‘thieving toad’. It has used the phrase once, in an article by one of its political staff, reporting it accurately as the protest by one heckler.

(Photo from The Guardian)