Close the door when you leave…
I had a choice of subject to return to for today’s ALAW: our errant South Aberdeen MP, Ross Thomson, or the Victorian horror that is Jacob Rees-Mogg. What a pair!
Rees-Mogg demeaned the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire this week by implying they didn’t use common sense, like he would have done, after being advised to stay put by the fire service rather than immediately evacuating their flats in the burning tower block. That was not only hugely insensitive, but also spoke volumes of an apparent self-entitled belief that victims have only themselves to blame, whether it is in a tragedy such as Grenfell or those who are less fortunate in society having not had the life chances of the Rees-Moggs of this world.
But the ALAW isn’t about him. I’ve chosen instead to return to the public embarrassment that is our MP here in South Aberdeen.
As an earlier post related, an MP (now known to be Labour’s Paul Sweeney) was wholly dissatisfied with the Parliamentary authority’s response to Thomson’s alleged grope-induced eviction from Westminster’s Stranger’s Bar in February this year. Consequently, he decided to lodge his own complaint about a separate incident in the same bar in which he claimed a drunken Thomson had groped him too. Thomson’s denials of impropriety have since been described as ‘jaw-dropping’ due to the number of witnesses to the alleged act and, again dissatisfied with the Parliamentary authority’s response and the likelihood of Thomson standing for re-election in the forthcoming general election, Sweeney went public with his allegation earlier this week.
As a result, Thomson has now stood down as the Conservative candidate for South Aberdeen. Did he jump or was he pushed by the local Conservative association? I guess we’ll never know for sure, but the fact that on the day after his withdrawal we received an election pamphlet from him suggests, to my mind at least, that he was pushed. I suspect he constituency association thought, like me, that he stood no chance of being elected again.
The pamphlet itself boasted of how hard Thomson had worked for his constituents. That was rich coming from one of the most ardent Brexiteers in the Conservative party ‘representing’ a constituency that voted strongly to remain. Elected members can, of course, choose to pursue their own perspective over that of their constituency, that happens with MPs of all political persuasions, but coming from someone that repeatedly makes the news headlines seemingly as a drunken reprobate, it rather sticks in the craw. We shan’t miss him.
Our MP has decided to go,
Lick his wounds and then to lie low,
But in truth, dear Ross,
You’ll be of no loss
So goodbye, toodle-oo, cheerio!
