Downfall of Labour’s swaggering thug who shamelessly milked the taxpayer for £200k a year expenses
NINE years ago, politician Eric Joyce was still taken seriously enough to be asked to write a piece for a new book: What Next for Labour? Ideas for a New Generation. He chose to call his contribution: ‘It’s a Sin.’
Well, they say you should write about what you know – and, even at this comparatively early stage in his spectacular moral descent, he and sin were on intimate terms.
Back in 2011 the former Army major was best known as the UK’s most shamelessly profligate MP, regularly topping the charts as the Commons’ biggest drain of public funds through his outrageous expenses claims.
He was also known for shooting his mouth off – lobbing insults like grenades without engaging the brain.
The Army knew him as ‘unemployable’ – the verdict of senior officers after suffering him for more than a decade. In the end they forced him to resign or else face discharge. And the Perthshire schools from which he was expelled knew him as trouble with a capital T.
So well acquainted was Joyce with the business of offending morals that it is staggering he found himself on any shortlist to become an elected representative.
Yet when the highly respected Dennis Canavan stood down as an MP in 2000 to concentrate on his work as an MSP, it was Joyce, as Labour’s candidate, who cleaned up in the ensuing Falkirk West by-election.
Over the next 15 years his conduct became increasingly ghastly. Indeed, by the time he stepped down in 2015 many considered him the most dishonourable MP in living memory.
Five years on, Joyce has extended his litany of disgraces yet again, this time with behaviour so repellent as to eclipse the foregoing decades of violence, drunkenness and shameless milking of the system for personal gain.
Now a registered sex offender and compiler of ‘category A’ child pornography, he faces a fate he predicted for himself in 2012. ‘Dead or in jail’ is how he saw his future back then unless he controlled his drinking.
In truth, Eric Stuart Joyce was out of control long before his drinking was.
As far back as 1975, the then Perth schoolboy’s disregard for authority was manifest and his temper explosive. That was the year he wrenched a pregnant teacher’s arm up her back and flung her out of her classroom, resulting in his expulsion from Perth Academy.
Two years later, at Perth High School, he pulled the same stunt. During a heated exchange with a young physics teacher over an experiment, he marched up to her, grabbed her around the waist, lifted her off her feet and carried her outside the classroom. She was left hysterical. It resulted in another expulsion, his first court appearance and a fine of £30.
HE WOULD find himself in many more court docks over the years – and many more final warnings and last chances would be given. Cocky Joyce blew them all.
Neill McCorquandale, a former headteacher at Perth Academy, said of him: ‘He was a persistent offender. He was arrogant and antiauthority.’ His classmates concurred. One, Douglas McBean, said: ‘I was there when he grabbed that pregnant teacher. He had a real problem with authority and that certainly hasn’t changed.’
Those, Joyce tried to say much later, were his tearaway years.
But there was a fondness in the way he spoke of them, a sense of pride, almost, in his delinquency which sat uneasily with his status as an MP. As his party would soon learn, Joyce had done very little growing up.
‘There’s always been a bit of mixing going on since my teens – stolen cars, assault, stuff like that,’ he told a reporter in his Commons office in 2012. ‘When I was stealing cars in the Seventies, you had a key that would fit every car. You’d wear it down, try again and it clicked.
‘All that hotwiring you see on telly is nonsense, you just used a bunch of keys. We would race them like maniacs.’ Joyce also shared how best to win fist fights: ‘You aim for the bridge of the nose because it is very soft. Then hit them. Just a couple of times.
‘You want to be a bit careful. If you punch them on the cheekbone or forehead, you’re more likely to break your fingers. If someone gets whacked and you stand over them and whack them again, that’s pretty much it.’
This only weeks after being convicted of four counts of assault in the Commons’ Strangers’ Bar.
He was fined £3,000, ordered to pay compensation to his victims, given community service, banned from entering any pub for three months, placed on a weekend curfew and forced to resign from the Labour Party. By then, no doubt, it considered him unemployable, too. A pity, then, that the party had not paid more attention to the Army’s view of their headstrong major when he was drummed out of the service.
That followed an incident in 1997 when Joyce wrote in a Leftwing pamphlet that the Army was sexist, racist and snobbish and that all the most senior officers were public school-educated.
He was threatened with a court martial but a compromise was reached – he was allowed to produce a military magazine where independent opinions could be expressed, albeit under the scrutiny of the Ministry of Defence.
A year later, however, senior officers had decided they could no longer work with him and Joyce was forced to resign. Never one to back away from a fight, he pledged to take the case to the European Court of Human
Rights. He said he might even petition the Queen. Ironically, it was the Queen’s Regulations he had broken by speaking out about the Army without permission.
PERHAPS Joyce’s highly public battle with the Army gave him a taste for politics. He emerged as a Labour candidate for the inaugural Scottish parliament in 1999 and, now married to a school head, styled himself as a crusader for teachers who, he said, deserved ‘serious professional respect’.
It was not long before the serious disrespect he had accorded them during his own schooldays became public knowledge.
His tilt at Holyrood was unsuccessful but that may have proved a blessing in disguise for this most acquisitive of men. Westminster turned out to be more lucrative.
In fairness, his first full year as an MP was something of a quiet one, expenses-wise, with Joyce only the 15th biggest spender out of a list of 657.
His claims rose by £40,000 to a grand total of £151,179 the following year and the dreaded No1 slot was his. It did not seem to bother him. He was there, or thereabouts, for years afterwards – in 2011 setting a new record by becoming the first MP to break the £200,000 barrier in a single year – and this after a vow to curb his expenses.
Joyce tried several tacks to explain his outlandish expenses claims. ‘Someone, by definition, will always be top of the list,’ was one. Another was the combative approach: ‘Which bit would you prefer I didn’t do? Should I pay my staff less, rent cheaper accommodation (it’s hardly over the top at present) or make myself less available in my constituency?’
The real explanation seemed to be that until he and his wife Rosemary split, they lived in Croydon, south London, which meant Joyce was spending a fortune commuting first-class between home and his constituency.
‘It is a unique, or perhaps I should say unusual, existence having a base at both ends,’ he said. ‘In the longer term, my domestic arrangements will probably be different.’
When his arrangements did change with the couple’s separation in 2008, however, the expenses claims only went up.
And when the MPs’ expenses scandal broke in 2009, Joyce was in it up to his neck.
He was one of 21 MPs who were revealed to have ‘flipped’ their second home designations, allowing them to buy furniture and fixtures for one home, having already claimed expenses for another. Yet it was Joyce’s aggression which really did for his career.
There was the time he spent a night in the cells after refusing to give police a specimen of breath following a road accident at a petrochemical plant near Falkirk.
A security guard said Joyce was ‘not compos mentis’. He later admitted that might have had something to do with the wine he had drunk on his flight to Scot
land. He was banned from driving for a year and resigned as shadow Northern Ireland minister.
In 2012 there was an alleged teen sex scandal. A former researcher, Meg Lauder, claimed she had a threemonth fling with him during his 2010 election campaign when she was 17.
Joyce denied any affair but said he had been in a ‘compromised position’ because he had been alone in his flat with her.
There was a run-in with Edinburgh Airport baggage handlers in 2013 when Joyce hurled racial insults at one of them, who was Afro-Caribbean. Predictably, his temper grew worse when police were called and, after putting up a struggle, he had to be handcuffed. He admitted breach of the peace at a 2014 court hearing.
Then there was the scuffle with two boys, aged 14 and 15, outside a shop in north London in 2014. Joyce, by then 54, challenged one of the boys with the words ‘You talking to me?’ – a line from the film Taxi Driver.
BUT it was his Strangers’ Bar brawl which overshadowed all else. It began when Joyce’s friend – an amateur opera singer – started to sing loudly in the bar, provoking startled glances from a nearby table.
Joyce, who had drunk a bottle of red wine, stood to warn Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke: ‘Don’t ever look at my guests in that way again’.
When another Conservative MP, Andrew Percy, asked him to sit down, Joyce shoved him up against the wall, shouting: ‘This bar is full of f ****** Tories.’
He then swung for Mr Shelbrooke, who ducked the blow. Joyce also punched Tory councillor Luke Mackenzie, splitting his lip, and head-butted another, Ben Maney.
Labour whip Phillip Wilson put a hand on Joyce’s shoulder and said: ‘Calm down Eric.’ Joyce punched him in the face. It took eight police officers to subdue him. As he was dragged away, he yelled: ‘You can’t touch me, I’m an MP.’
A year later, he was arrested over an alleged drunken brawl at the Commons’ sport and social club. He was released without charge.
He clung to his Falkirk seat until 2015, the last three years as an independent, drawing his £65,000 salary and contributing next to nothing.
It was during this time Joyce took up with writer India Knight. There was, for a time, talk of a wedding.
Not until the 2015 general election did the misery finally end for the people of Falkirk, when he stood down.
New depths of criminality would soon be plumbed by this appalling character. But at least he was not their problem any more.