MP urged to quit over sex text shame
SEX scandal MP Andrew Griffiths was urged to quit Westminster last night – amid claims he could be investigated by Parliament’s new anti-sleaze watchdog.
Mr Griffiths, 47, resigned as Small Business Minister at the weekend amid revelations that he sent 2,000 perverted texts to barmaid Imogen Treharne, 28, and another woman – but he remains an MP.
In one text, the married father-of-one referred to himself as “daddy” and suggested the women beat each other for his pleasure. Ms Treharne revealed the Tory MP for Burton, Staffordshire, bombarded her with messages crudely detailing violent sex acts and pleading for explicit images.
Mr Griffiths could now become the first MP to be dealt with by a new antiharassment watchdog, to be unveiled by Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom and voted on by MPs this week.
Councillor Michael Fitzpatrick, Labour group leader on Tory-run East Staffordshire Council, said Mr Griffiths had “crossed a very sick line”. He added: “It is shocking. He needs to resign as our MP.
“I couldn’t sit across a room from him and conduct business. He must stand down.
Labour MP Jessica Phillips said: “I don’t think someone with that attitude should be an MP. How can a woman constituent ever feel safe seeking help from him?”
Mr Griffiths has apologised to his wife Kate and stressed that he was seeking “professional help”.
AND so another one bites the dust. Another man, another remorseful speech as yet another political career ends in ignominy. This time it’s Andrew Griffiths, minister for small business and – truly wretched, this bit – new father to a three-month-old baby girl. He bombarded two barmaids with more than 2,000 sexual messages in three short weeks. One way of getting out of nappy duties, I suppose.
He wasn’t the first MP and will not be the last. Political history is smeared with this stuff: remember Cecil Parkinson’s affair with his secretary? David Mellor’s fling with an actress? Mark Oaten, nabbed for his fondness for male prostitutes? Stephen Crabb, forced to stand down at Work and Pensions two years ago? Crabb – like Griffiths – was considered to be a rising star of the Conservative Party before being exposed for sending inappropriate messages to a young woman. Ironically his replacement was Damian Green, who later tripped over his own sleaze bucket filled with allegations of unwanted “touching” and pornography.
Their transgressions are mirrored in the US politician Anthony Weiner who had to resign from Congress in 2011 after sending explicit messages to a female student. And then went on to complete his disgrace by following suit five years later with another girl. Only this one was just 15.
Not one of them had any need to do it – or, more to the point, never had any need to be found out.
HOW clearly I remember thinking this back in the 1990s when the then director of public prosecutions Sir Allan Green chucked away all he had ever worked for by kerb-crawling for hookers in King’s Cross, which in those days was an infamous haunt for tawdry cheap frills and routinely policed at night because of it. Why? Sir Allan could have bought all the privacy he needed by checking into a five-star hotel and slipping a fistful of dollars into the right paw for a discreet “take-away” service. And yet he chose to trawl the trash in the public gaze instead.
Not that catch-me-if-you-can is limited to the world of politics. If Allan Green did not have to be found out, nor did Hugh Grant. For heaven’s sakes, there’s not a woman in the world who would crawl over him to get to Nicholas Soames. And if he cared about secrecy – well, as with Green, he had the money to buy it in elegant seclusion. Not in the back of a motor in the sleazier alleyways of Los Angeles with Divine Brown.
But if things were bad before, the arrival of all things internet – webcammery and sexting (see: there’s even a new language for it) – have made it so much worse. There is no other form of harassment than texting that an oaf can achieve 2,000 times in three weeks. Similarly the internet ether is an unforgiving beast: once its prey is seized it never, ever lets go.
When poor Leslie Grantham died last month the actor was probably remembered for a career-ending, lewd webcam film of himself that “got into” the public domain more than he was for anything good he actually achieved.
Ah, you say, but he filmed it himself. And so he did. And, yes, of course he knew the risk.
But that, in the end, for all these idiots is the point: they do know the risk. And that is precisely why they do it.
It is a phenomenon that is by and large confined to men – for which, I fear, we all carry a bit of the blame. Do we not speak with just a hint of admiration when we say of young boys that they are “little daredevils”? Do we use the same tone to say the same thing of young girls? I venture that we do not. To girls we shout: “Come down from that tree. NOW. You’ll HURT yourself!”
So men are raised to feel the rewards of risk (see those barely-clad girls fawning over James Bond as he coolly bets his all on the turn of a card). That teaches them first to face fear – then carry on regardless. In the process they fall into the grip of the mightily powerful adrenaline to which in turn they become quite literally addicted. And like most drugs it serves them well. At first.
Fuelled by adrenaline they fight for their jobs, their title, their money – they build their success. Until one day they realise they really do have it all. So where now to find that missing high?
Why, in risking the whole bloody lot. That’s where.
For Hugh Grant his success was entirely down to his image: his clean-cut image. So his risk was simple: dirty it. For the director of public prosecutions his success was reaching the heights of the law. So his was: break it. For many of the politicians their success is their publicly perfect family. So their risk is: let it be seen as a fake.
OTHERS complicate it just to heighten the kick. I know a married “showbiz mogul” who, for a dirty night out with a floozie wannabe, books a bedroom at a Soho haunt of celebrities where he and his wife know 90 per cent of the patrons.
And by the way, speaking of moguls: all the #MeToos in the world won’t stop that kind of shenanigan. What they will do is make the risk, and thus the high, bigger: g’wan, dob me in if ya think you’re hard enough.
But time will run out and in the end, of course, they all lose. As gamblers do. One of the saddest men I’ve ever met never gambled a penny when he was poor. Only when he had scrambled to the top, looked around and saw that he owned all he surveyed, did he take up roulette. The only excitement left to him now was to risk losing the lot.
Tragically for him and his family, he succeeded at that too.
‘They know the risk and they still do it’