The sad case of Geoff Hoon’s 3am tweets
Legend has it that ernest Hemingway once bet a tableful of friends ten dollars each that he could write a story using just six words. He then wrote on a napkin the words, ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn,’ and picked up his winnings.
Short stories — very short stories — may be found in the least likely places, and, often, the most poignant are true.
I came across one at the weekend. I was composing a clerihew about Chris Huhne, as one does, when I found myself wondering what had happened to his near-namesake geoff Hoon.
Hoon is, you may remember, the former Labour defence Secretary who fell from grace just before the 2010 general election after being caught in a Channel 4 sting operation offering his services for money. This resulted in his being banned from Parliament for five years.
Where is he now? The most unlikely people have taken to Twitter, so I typed ‘ geoff Hoon Twitter’ into the search engine, on the off-chance. Up came: ‘Rt Hon geoff Hoon MP: @geoffHoonMP’, which certainly appears to be his official Twitter account.
The first thing I noticed was the extraordinary modesty of his online presence: Tweets 11, Followers 10. disgraced he may have been, but how could he possibly have attracted so few followers? Sir Malcolm Rifkind, another former defence Secretary caught, more recently, in a Channel 4 sting, boasts 2,743 followers.
On closer examination, Hoon’s paucity of tweets and followers is explained: his first and last tweets both took place on exactly the same day, April 5, 2010 — a fortnight after the revelations — very, very early in the morning, in that nightmarish half-hour between 2.51am and 3.21am.
The first, tweeted at 2.51am, reads, somewhat plaintively: ‘Please don’t believe everything you read about in the press. They have a tendency to exaggerrate [sic]. I’m not a bad chap really!’
As with his other ten tweets, it contains mis- spellings and the odd word left out. The next, sent two minutes later, at 2.53am, is addressed to his former colleague Harriet Harman. Sweetly, it reads: ‘ Hello Harriet. didn’t know you were on here! Just signed up myself!’
This is the first indication that he imagines tweeting to be a private form of communication, addressed from one person to another, with no one else looking in. As with the others, there is no sign of any reply. Hoon sends his third tweet just one minute later, at 2.54am. Again, it is to Harriet Harman. ‘Just wanted you to know I am still available to help the party in an [ sic] I can during election period, despite everything’. Again, there is no reply. Before his downfall, he had been involved in an abortive coup against the then Labour leader, gordon Brown: perhaps this explains Harman’s reluctance to get involved.
He is now tweeting at the furious rate of one a minute. At 2.55am, he tweets: ‘ Please vote Labour on May 6 and help your local party assosciation [ sic]. Volunteers are always welcome!’
He then pauses for four minutes before tweeting Jim Sheridan MP. ‘Hello Jim. Best of luck with the campaign. Big day tomorrow!’
He waits a further three minutes before tweeting John Prescott, at 3.02am. Once again, he appears to believe he is communicating with him privately. ‘I’ve signed up to twitter to try and get the proper story re recent events out to the people. I hope I have your support John.’ no reply.
At 3.07am, he tweets ed Balls. This one has an air of defeat about it, a tweet that seems to expect the answer no. ‘I am always available to help the party, despite everything. I’m sure you know that. Right now we need to have all hands on deck.’
THRee minutes later, at 3.10am, he tweets Balls again. He seems to have got a bit of fight back in him. ‘ We must keep the pressure on Chris grayling. We have to force Cameron to back him or sack him.’
At 3.13am, he tweets John Prescott: ‘We must remember a lot of people will have sympathy for graylings [sic] position re rights for business owners to discriminate.’
And a minute later, another to Prescott: ‘How is the recruitment of celebs like @chrisdjmoyles and @ fearne cotton to help the campaign going. Any luck?’
Finally, at 3.21am, geoff Hoon writes his last tweet. It is to Angela eagle MP: ‘It will be a tough fight with polls going the way they are, but I have every confidence you will prevail. Best of luck! x’
And there we have it: a sad little short story, full of dashed hope, with a tinge of desperation. Who would have wished to be geoff Hoon, at that time of that day?
‘At three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote ‘. . . and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.’