What can you say about an all male club in London that allowed women to be members from 2008 and then made the ludicrous Ann Widdecombe its first female member? I’d say it’s the Carlton Club, a private members club in London, the original home of the Conservative party, whose members are exclusively Conservative. And it’s dirt cheap to join. A mere £1600 a year for a maximum of 20 visits and a bargain basement £3200 for 60 visits a year. Where can I join? Clearly, the wonderfully named Chris Pincher MP won’t be allowed back anytime soon following last night’s revelation.
Mr Pincher was Boris Johnson’s deputy chief whip (let’s ditch the jokes, eh?) until his resignation where he admitted getting totally shit-faced at the club and groping various men. Now, I am no stranger to the odd half of bitter and a glass of red, although I do tend to avoid getting shit-faced, but even if I do have ‘one too many’ my self-conscious state does not free me up to start groping people of either sex. I have had the odd dalliance with members of the opposite sex, and indeed a few not so odd ones, but the word ingrained in my very being is consensual. Basically, no, whether said or unsaid, means no. End of. For Mr Pincher no doesn’t register at all given his ‘previous’, which nonetheless didn’t prevent Johnson appointing him to a government job.
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a rarity in the Tory party. During Johnson’s extra-marital affair with the then Carrie Symonds, when he was trying to secure her a highly paid government job, an MP arrived unannounced in his office whilst the PM was being…ahem…orally pleasured. I mean, jobs for blow jobs? Then there’s the former Tory MP for Wakefield, the nonce Imran Khan (no, not that Imran Khan) who was banged up for getting a young boy pissed and then sexually assaulting him. Neil Parish, the former Tory MP for Tiverton, who thought it reasonable to watch porn on his phone in the House of Commons when it was in session. And another Tory MP David Warburton who has lost the whip following allegations of him assaulting three women.
These don’t appear to isolated incidents: they appear to be the norm. And why not given the lack of morality of the world king himself, Boris Johnson, who doesn’t seem to know how many children he has got? Leadership covers a lot of bases, for sure and one of them is setting an example. Yes, we are all humans and we all have faults but there is a pattern here. Do as I do, not as I say.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone and all that and I can’t pretend my occasionally colourful private life would set a great example to the young folk of our land. But generally speaking I wasn’t a groper, a deviant, a pervert or a nonce. More than that, I despise people who are. Parts of this blog are ‘light-hearted’ but the truth is that Mr Pincher is at least one of these things and he deserves to be booted out of politics full stop. He is, or was, a man who wields considerable power and bad people with lots of power – see also Al ‘You Can Call Me Boris’ Johnson – are a menace to us all. Get out of politics, Mr Pincher, and sort your life out. Don’t blame it on booze, the boogie or anything else. Stop groping because one day you will grope someone who will do more than simply make a complaint about you.
Maybe Ann Widdecombe isn’t so ludicrous after all. Mad as a box of frogs, for sure, and often extremely unpleasant with it, but she doesn’t appear to be a serial groper. That makes her a far better person than Mr Pincher, but what a low bar.
